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MODERN 
FRENCH LITERATURE 






MODERN 



FRENCH LITERATURE 



BY 



BENJAMIN W. WELLS, Ph.D. (Harv.) 



•* 



BOSTON 

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 

1909 



ft, 







A 



Copyright, 1896, 1909, 
By Benj. W. Wells. 



Ml rights reserved. 



Cb.lt, 344057 
JUL 26 1909 



iHmtoetstts Press: 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. 



PREFACE. 



This book is meant to serve as a companion, and 
possibly a guide, to the better appreciation and enjoy- 
ment of those authors who mark progress or change in 
the evolution of literary ideals in France since the 
Eevolution. Until any book that is worth reading is 
seen in its true perspective, one will not draw from it its 
full measure of pleasure or profit. To give some clew T 
to the books that are significant, whether as products 
or as causes of changed critical standards and aesthetic 
principles, is what is attempted in these chapters. 

Three introductory chapters sketch the evolution of 
French literature till the close of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, that the reader may be reminded of those authors 
whose influence is still felt and of whom it belongs to 
the humane life to know. In the more detailed studies 
that follow, no mention is made of' imitators or hack 
writers, however ephemerally popular, nor of any work 
that has not literary imagination and artistic form, in 
order that attention may be concentrated on those 
writers who stand for something, who mark progress 



VL PEEFACE. 

or change. In estimating their place and function, I 
have used freely the critical apparatus cited in the 
foot-notes, but I have never expressed a literary opinion 
that is not based on examination of the original work, 
though doubtless my position has been modified by 
the masters of French criticism, and, as I have used at 
times, notes made long since and for another purpose, 
it is possible that I have still unacknowledged debts, 
to avoid the possibility of which would involve what 
seems to me an undue sacrifice. 

This book was first published in 1896. It has been 
revised throughout, and considerable additions have 
been made in the later chapters, that new tendencies, 
new writers, and the new work of those that had already 
claimed notice might not fail of mention. 

BENJAMIN W. WELLS. 
New York, 
May, 1909. 



CONTENTS- 



CHAPTER i. 

Pages 
Middle Age and Renascence 1-42 

Twelfth century: Romances, lyrics, and fabliaux, 1. Thirteenth 
century : Lyrics, drama, satire, historical prose, 6. Fourteenth 
and fifteenth centuries: Lyrics and historic prose, 11; The 
Renascence, 17; Marot, 24; Ronsard, 27. Drama, history, 
and theology, 31; Rabelais, 33. Fiction, 38; Montaigne, 39. 

CHAPTER II. 

The Seventeenth Century 43-81 

Poetry: Malherbe, 43; Boileau, 48; La Fontaine, 50. Novels, 54. 
Essays, 57. Philosophy, 57. Memoirs, 58. Letters, 60. Ora- 
tory, 62. Drama: Corneille, 65; Racine, 71; Moliere, 75; 
Regnard, 80. Retrospect, 80. 

CHAPTER III. 

The Eighteenth Century 82-118 

Voltaire, 82. Lyrics and Epics, 90. Drama: Le Sage, 95; Mari- 
vaux, 96 ; Beaumarchais, 99. History, 101. Oratory, 103. 
Philosophy, 103. Criticism, 106. Fiction: Le Sage, 107; 
Marivaux, 109; Voltaire, 111; Diderot, 112; Rousseau, 113. 



viii CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER IV. 

Pages 
Madame de Stael and Chateaubriand .... 119-151 

Literature under Bonaparte, 119. Life and Character of Madame 
de Stael, 120: Corinne, 128; Allemagne, 129. Life and char- 
acter of Chateaubriand, 135: Atala, 142; Genie du chris- 
tianisrne, 143; Rene, 145; Martyrs, 147; Itineraire, 148. 
Chateaubriand's influence, 148. 

CHAPTER V. 
The Romantic School 152-191 

Sources and character of Romanticism, 152. Poetry: Beranger, 
158; Lamartine, 159; De Vigny, 162; De Musset, 165; Gau- 
tier, 169. Drama: Dumas, 176; De Vigny, 178; De Musset, 
179. Fiction: De Vigny, 181; De Musset, 182; Gautier, 184; 
Dumas, 187. Decline of Romanticism, 191. 

CHAPTER VI. 

The Young Hugo 192-224 

Early Lyrics, 198. Han d'Islande, 200. Cromwell, 202. Orien- 
tates, 205. Dramas from Hernani to Les Burgraves, 206. 
Notre-Dame, 220. Second lyric period, 221. Hugo as a 
politician, 224. 

k CHAPTER VII. 

Hugo in Exile and in Triumph 225-264 

Biography, 225. Fiction: Miserables, 232; Travailleurs de la mer, 
235; Quatre-vingt-treize, 236. Lyric and epic poetry, 237. 
Philosophic poetry, 253. Gleanings and posthumous volumes, 
253. Hugo's work reflects his mind in its substance and its 
form, 256. His influence and popularity, 260. 



CONTENTS. 1X 

CHAPTER VIII. 

Pages 

The Evolution of History and Criticism . . . 265-302 

Growth of the historic spirit, 265. Thierry, 266. Michelet, 267. 
Development of criticism, 272. Sainte-Beuve, 274. Taine, 
278. Kenan, 288. Contemporary critics, 299. 

CHAPTER IX. 

The Evolution of Lyric Poetry 303-352 

The Parnassians: Banville, 304; Lecontede Lisle, 309; De Heredia, 
318; Coppee, 321; Sully-Prudhomme, 324. The Decadents: 
Baudelaire, 332; Verlaine, 342. The Symbolists, 350. 

CHAPTER X. 

The Evolution of the Drama 353-395 

Scribe, 353 ; Augier, 356 ; Dumas fils, 369 ; Sardou, 379 ; Labiche 
and minor dramatists. 387 ; the Naturalistic drama, 393 ; Ros- 
tand and Maeterlinck, 395. 

CHAPTER XL 

Modern Fiction. — I. The Evolution of Naturalism 396-431 

George Sand, 397; Henri Beyle (Stendhal), 405; Balzac, 4.U \ 
Merimee, 427. 

CHAPTER XII. 

Modern Fiction. — IT. The Naturalistic School . 432-463 
Flaubert, 433 ; The Brothers Goncourt, 440~; Zola, 446 ; Huysmans, 
457; Maupassant, 458; Minor novelists, 463. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

Pages 

Modern Fiction. — III. The Waning of Naturalism 464-503 

The Compromisers: Feuillet, Cherbuliez, Fabre, Theuriet, 464; 
Daudet, 467; Ohnet, 490. Minor novelists, 491. Exotic fic- 
tion : Loti, 492. The Psychologists: Bourget, 494; Barres, 498; 
Minor novelists, 498 ; Marcel Prevost, 500 ; Paul Margueritte, 
501. 



Index 505-510 



MODEEN FEENCH LITEEATUKE. 



CHAPTEK I. 

MIDDLE AGE AND KENASCENCE. 

Books began to be written in French somewhat later 
than in English or German, because Latin survived 
longer in Gaul as the language of the cultured. The 
English and the Germans had no classical past to check 
and discourage efforts in what might seem a degraded 
dialect ; and so, long after Charlemagne had made his 
collection of heroic Teutonic ballads, long after Eng- 
lish hearts had thrilled to the story of Beowulf, French 
was still an unwritten language, in which the first 
stammerings of literary expression had yet to be heard, 
though even in the middle of the seventh century we 
read that a bishop of Noyon was chosen " because he 
understood both Teutonic and Bomance, " which would 
show that many that spoke either tongue understood 
no other. 

Bomance is the indefinite designation of many dia- 
lects. What survived in literature is essentially Low 
Latin with greatly maimed inflections, much confusion 
of vowels and elision of consonants. A few words 
recall the Celtic that the Latin had almost wholly dis- 
placed in the first century of our era ; many more words 
w^ere retained from their own mother tongue by the 

l 



2 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

conquering Franks. The first to put this new growth 
to literary use were, naturally, the clergy. The clois- 
ters furnished the leisure ; the needs of the missionaries 
and devotees, the motive. Already in the tenth century 
there were legends of the saints and bits of Bible story 
that have much simple beauty; and when once this 
fountain-head had been opened, it poured a rich and 
constant stream that has not ceased to flow for eight 
centuries. There are no such dreary wastes in French 
literature as those that separate Chaucer from Spenser, 
or Luther from Lessing. There is hardly a generation 
since the " Chanson de Eoland " that has not had some 
work of real excellence to show ; and all this literature, 
even the oldest, has been readily and easily intelligible. 
No educated Frenchman has ever needed a long prepara- 
tion to assimilate the literary content of the " Song of 
Eoland, " and so early French literature has had more 
direct influence on the culture of the last hundred years 
than early English has had. Surely no predecessor of 
Shakspere is so present in the minds of modern writers 
as Eabelais or Montaigne. To indicate as briefly as pos- 
sible the relation of these early centuries to our own, is 
my purpose in this chapter. 

The first popular literature was metrical, both for the 
convenience of the reciter who had to memorize it, and 
also to admit of a musical accompaniment. And since 
the minstrel depended on the interest he could evoke, 
he naturally chose the themes that attracted those 
who had most to give, and were likely to be most lav- 
ish in the giving. These were the knights and nobles ; 
and the deeds of their chivalrous ancestors were the 
subjects that most effectually touched their pride and 
loosed their purse-strings. When he was the guest 
of a cloister, the singer might recount the Passion of 



MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 6 

our Lord, of Saint Eulalie, or of Saint Alexis, but in 
the castle his welcome depended on the local character 
of his repertory. Hence the groups of " Chansons de 
geste " (Family Songs) that, when compiled and joined 
to one another with more or less skill, made up the 
greater part of the literature of the eleventh and twelfth 
centuries, and continued to be re-edited and further ex- 
tended in the thirteenth. Such " Chansons " naturally 
served as a model for those who had recent history to 
record; and some of these rhymed chronicles — Wace's 
" Eoman de Eou, " for instance — have a sort of literary 
interest. 

About a hundred of these epic songs have survived 
the rack of time. The most famous of them all is the 
story of Eoland's death at Eoncesvalles (August 15, 
778), which indeed no other chanson resembles or 
approaches in naive realism and rugged beauty. 1 All 
of them are written in couplets of careful structure, 
united by assonance or vowel rhyme. The hero is 
usually, as in Eoland's case, connected with Charle- 
magne, and with the struggles of Christians and infi- 
dels ; but there is always fighting of some kind, and 
women play a very subordinate part. Love is over- 
laid by the stronger emotions of faith and patriotism 
in the " Song of Eoland, " and by the mere love of 
brawling in some of the inferior * Chansons, " which 
differ greatly in this from the freer inventions that 
were gradually developed from them as literature and 
culture progressed. Legends of the British King 
Arthur had attracted the Normans in England, and 
were by them brought to France, where most of them 
had been versified before the end of the twelfth cen- 

1 Cp. Lanson, Litterature francaise, p. 26. Cited hereafter as 
Lanson. 



4 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

tury, mainly by Chrestien de Troyes, to whom, in 
turn, England owes the " Morte d' Arthur, " and Ger- 
many the epics of Hartmann, Wolfram, and Gottfried. 

These romances, when contrasted with the " Chan- 
sons, " show a growing culture and refinement, a more 
developed courtesy, and so a more prominent position 
for women, as was natural on the eve of the u age of 
chivalry." Idealization shows itself also in the reli- 
gious background, which in the grail saga becomes 
very prominent and mystical. Then, too, the form 
shows more refinement. Assonance is succeeded by 
true rhyme. But what is more significant is the appeal 
to a wider public. Tradespeople and bourgeois begin 
to find a place in the stories, — characters that would 
have had no interest for the public of the " Chansons, " 
to whom no minstrel would have ventured to intro- 
duce them. 

The " Chansons de geste " had been national, if not 
local, in tone, and the romances were essentially in 
accord with the mediaeval spirit ; the next stage of 
development, however, was more purely artificial. 
Thirst for novelty, aided by the demands of the mo- 
nastic schools, led to translations and adaptations of 
classical subjects, especially the legends of Alexander, 
to one of which in twelve-syllable lines we owe the 
alexandrine verse that was destined to play a great 
part in the French prosody of many following centu- 
ries. Nature, too, begins to interest ; and " Bestiaries, " 
true " fairy tales of science, " such as that age knew, 
tell of the strange virtues and habits of animals, while 
other didactic poems recount similar traits of plants 
and stones. Lyric poetry now begins to be cultivated 
by the aristocracy. Troubadours in the south and 
Trouvkres in the north write " Bomances " and " Pastou- 



MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 5 

relies, " dealing always with ladies and shepherdesses, 
nearly always with love, usually of a rather facile 
character. Meanwhile the true, unsanctified esprit 
gaulois was revealing itself in " Fabliaux, " — short 
stories in verse, frankly coarse, and often brutal, 
usually comic and satirical, often cynically skeptical 
of virtue and with touches of what modern Frenchmen 
call blague. These tales were written by men, and 
they are not tender to feminine foibles. No doubt 
they give too dark a picture of the national morals; 
but they are essentially realistic stories of every-day 
life, in strong contrast with the artificial " Pastou- 
relles. " They were to the middle and lower classes as 
natural as the " Chansons de geste " to the knights. 
Hence they had in them fruitful seeds of life, and 
exercised a great and lasting influence. They were so 
true to unspiritualized human nature that they needed 
little to adapt them to any age or environment. So 
the " Fabliaux " have been a storehouse whence the 
novelists and dramatists of later times have drawn 
some of their best material. The debt of Boccaccio, of 
De la Salle, of Chaucer, Shakspere, and Molikre to the 
old French " Fabliaux " shows that human nature does 
not greatly change in crossing the Alps or the Channel, 
nor yet from century to century. 

From the " Fabliaux " to the drama might seem a 
natural transition, for many of them were in dialogue. 
But here the initiative came from the effort of the 
clergy to make the Scripture story more real to the 
unlettered multitude than painting or sculpture could 
have done. " Miracle Plays " were already acted in 
French before the close of the twelfth century; but 
they have hardly a trace of literary merit, such as 
would entitle them to rank with the epics and lyrics 



6 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

of the time. The thirteenth century, however, was 
to produce in all these fields the best that mediaeval 
literature has to offer, here as in Germany ; and it 
is interesting to note that in both countries this re- 
markable age was followed by a stationary if not 
retrogressive one. 

Narrative verse in the thirteenth century, though 
abundant, shows little invention of new subjects. The 
tales of chivalrous adventure develop the old themes, 
with classical reminiscences in the spirit of free fancy 
and romantic fiction, with less energy but more grace 
and beauty. And beside this survival there rises the 
prose tale, drawing its inspiration through Greece by 
the attrition of the Crusades, as well as from the Latin 
and the older French epics, which it first equals and 
then surpasses both in bulk and interest. This indi- 
cates that while there was still an audience for the 
minstrel, a reading public was growing that would 
presently make him superfluous as a narrator and 
change him to a singer of songs. 

There is a pretence of didactic purpose in most of the 
translated tales of the " Gesta Komanorum " and in 
the oriental " Seven Wise Masters ; " but original 
didactic writing is usually in versified fables, in 
Aesop's manner; and in the hands of Marie de France 
these attain at the outset a remarkable grace and 
pathos, though the best work of this genial lady is in 
the lais, — short narrative lyrics, perhaps the most 
original poems of the century. The songs of Thibaut 
of Champagne are also very delicate and beautiful. 
Both poets belong to the high aristocracy and to the 
earlier half of the century, and their numerous imita- 
tors were thoroughly aristocratic both in their lives 
and work. The close of the century shows, however, 



MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 7 

a marked shifting of the centre of production. Its 
chief authors, Euteboeuf and Adam de la Halle, belong, 
by birth and instinct, to the people, and give a dis- 
tinctly democratic tone to the drama and to social 
and political satire. 

The former is a typical Parisian bourgeois of the 
period, whom poverty compelled to turn his hand to 
hack-work of almost every kind, — panegyrics, lives of 
saints and miracle plays, fabliaux, and crusading 
songs, — but who avenged himself in days of compara- 
tive ease by satirical attacks on his taskmasters, chiefly 
the clergy and the monks. Some of these, especially 
the autobiographical " Marriage " and " Complaint, " 
have still pungency enough to insure their life. But 
while Euteboeuf was advancing literature on various 
lines, his contemporary, Adam de la Halle, was so 
broadening the French drama that he almost seems its 
creator. He carried it beyond the religious sphere. 
He took both his scenes and his characters from the 
life of his own day and of his native Arras, and so 
" Le Jeu de la feuillde " (c. 1262) is the first French 
comedy of manners. Nor was this his only happy hit. 
In " Eobin and Marion " he was first to turn the " Pas- 
tourelle " into light opera. The invention of these two 
genres make the century memorable in French dramatic 
history, though the plays themselves may seem jejune 
enough to a modern reader. 

Meantime the fable, under the same democratic 
impulse, had developed from the apologue to the 
epopee in " Eenard the Fox, " whose protean forms attest 
its popularity throughout the Middle Ages. 1 Here 
are told, with obvious sympathy, the tricks by which 

1 The original source seems to have been Flanders. See Lanson, 
p. 89. 



8 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

the Fox outwits the authority of the Lion, the strength 
of the Bear, and the envy of lesser enemies. It thus 
lends itself easily to the freest social and political 
satire, of which the moral basis, like that of the 
" Fabliaux, " is cynical skepticism that mocks honor, 
duty, loyalty, and has unqualified admiration for 
worldly shrewdness. The scheme admitted an indefi- 
nite addition of new episodes, until at last this 
product of many authors and several generations reached 
the huge bulk of thirty* thousand lines, and seemed 
likely to die of its own hypertrophy, even while eager 
imitators were composing new poems on its model. 

The obvious danger of satirical allegory is artificial 
elaboration that makes it both unintelligible and 
wearisome. This is the fault of " Eenard, " and in a 
still greater degree of the " Eomance of the Eose, " — a 
more brilliant poem of nearly equal length, in which 
the Middle Ages found an exhaustless mine of mi- 
sogynist irony. The wit is of the keenest, but the 
allegory is too fine spun ; and delightful as the poem is 
in parts, few will have the patience to unravel its 
tangled plot, in this age that cannot digest the " Faerie 
Queene. " But in its day its fame was very great ; it 
claimed a translation from Chaucer, and some knowl- 
edge of its character belongs even to general literary 
culture. 

" The Eomance of the Eose" is not a homogeneous 
work. Gruillaume de Loris began it in the aristocratic 
part of the century ; Jean de Meung finished it in the 
wholly different democratic spirit that marked Adam 
and Eutebceuf. The former planned a scholarly alle- 
gory of the Eose of beauty guarded by the virtues from 
the vices and from the Lover, whom some assist and 
others hinder in his effort to pluck and bear her from 



MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 9 

the well -defended garden. Guillaume is often truly 
poetic and occasionally realistic, yet there is small 
trace in these pretty conceits of anything but serious 
moralizing. But when Jean took up the parable, in a 
continuation some four times the length of the original, 
he maintained, indeed, the essential thread of the 
allegory, but allowed himself the freest scope for the 
display of a varied reading and wide learning, and for 
satirical digressions that enter nearly every field of 
what was then current in science and speculation, in 
philosophy, physics, and theology. These give the 
poem its chief interest to-day, though to the student 
of mediaeval manners it offers pictures that would be 
sought in vain elsewhere, and in its peculiar vein it 
has probably never been equalled. Jean de Meung 
was the first popularizer of rationalism, of Nature as 
the guide of life. He is the true predecessor of Rabe- 
lais, of Montaigne, and of Voltaire; and though he 
never ceased to imagine himself a devout Catholic, he 
is essentially Protestant at heart. Nature, to him, is 
the source of beauty ; to live according to Nature is 
true morality. If he appears sometimes crude and 
even cynical in his judgments of those who seem most 
to contradict Nature, the monks and women, he is in 
the main a severe moralist ; and though his work is a 
strange and ill-ordered medley, he is surely the most 
original thinker who wrote in French before the 
Eenaissance. 

The historical prose of the thirteenth century is 
probably more read than any of its purely literary 
productions, perhaps because both Villehardouin at 
the beginning and Joinville at the close of this period 
were closer students of real life than the poets. Ville- 
hardouin writes what might pass for a prose chanson de 



10 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

geste if it were not known to be the account of a sober 
eyewitness of the Fourth Crusade, or, as he more 
justly calls it, of the Conquest of Constantinople, — for 
Christians, not Saracens, were its victims. No account 
of this mad adventure could lack a spice of romance ; 
but Villehardouin put into it all the childlike naivete 
of his time, all the energy of a man of action, all the 
piety of the ages of faith, all the enthusiasm that par- 
ticipation in a great task could inspire in a generous 
soul. Thus his Chronicle, as Saintsbury has said, 
gives a better idea of chivalry and feudalism at their 
best, than any other single work. It mirrors the life 
of the Middle Ages, as the " Eomance of the Eose " does 
its thought. It has much of the charm of Froissart, 
and will never seem old so long as hearts are young. 

During the century others continued the tradition, 
though they did not attain the excellence of the Cru- 
sader, and toward its close the monks of St. Denis be- 
gan to compile their official history in French ; but that 
was not literature. On the other hand, Joinville's biog- 
raphy of his friend and master, Louis IX. the Saint, 
has a peculiar grace and charm that six centuries have 
not made to fade. Louis died in 1270, but Joinville 
wrote a generation later in advanced old age. The 
century that separates him from Villehardouin was, as 
we have seen, one of disillusionment; sentiment was 
yielding to satire, and this was reflected in history as 
it had been in the epic and lyric poetry. Joinville is 
more reflective, more inquisitive too. He is a little 
skeptical about the merit of fighting for fighting's sake, 
and has his doubts about the value of knight-errantry. 
There is a great deal of keen though playful satire 
in the anecdotes that he recalls of the good king. It 
seems as though the same moral lassitude which in 



MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 11 

Germany had followed the collapse of Frederic II. 's 
efforts for the emancipation of the human mind, the 
discouraged consciousness of the failure of the Cru- 
sades, and the growing weight of the ecclesiastical yoke, 
had here the same effect that it was having in the 
Empire, driving men to a critical, questioning spirit, 
to thoughts they were fain to veil in allegory and 
satire. And Joinville's work is interesting also from 
a rhetorical side. In him French prose proved its 
fitness for literary use. It was no longer an experi- 
ment, and it is essentially on the lines of his style 
that it grew and perfected itself. 

Indeed, so long as the mediaeval spirit continued, 
so long as education and especially classical culture 
was confined to the few, till the minds of men were 
enlarged and their horizons broadened, no radical 
change could be expected in literature. The French 
had already expressed their tender feelings in lyrics, 
their heroic aspirations in chansons, their life in the 
chronicles, their social views in satires. They were 
restless, questioning, expectant. Under these condi- 
tions an arrested literary development is almost inevi- 
table. There might be no decline. Good work might 
continue to be done on the old lines ; but presently the 
disillusionment spread and deepened.- They felt that the 
old social system was cracking. It took no prophet to 
see that feudalism was doomed. But a new literature 
could arise only with a new enthusiasm ; and that 
enthusiasm came after two centuries of expectation 
from the inspiring breath of Italian culture and the 
classical Eenaissance. 

In poetry this intervening period counts the notable 
names of Charles d'Orl^ans and Francois Villon 1 in 

1 Orleans, b. 1391, d. 1465. Villon, b. 1431, d. about 1463. 



12 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

a numerous company, whose ingenuity was exercised 
less over matter than form. It has been said that 
" their poetry was all technique, and all their tech- 
nique was difficulty. * They invented a great number 
of metrical arrangements, more or less artificial, such 
as the ballade, with its equivocal and retrograde vari- 
ations, the rondeau, rondel, triolet, virelay, and the 
chanson royal, 1 which some English poets are exer- 
cising their skill to imitate to-day, so that these men 
enjoy a sort of esoteric cult and some real revival of 
popularity. For no one can read D 'Orleans' graceful, 
nonchalant verses without delight, though their ethical 
value is of the slightest, and the fickle muse surely 
deserts him if ever he presumes to be serious. Bitter 
experience of the uncertainties of politics had made 
him pay for the honor of a high command at Agincourt 
with a long imprisonment in England, whence he re- 
turned a devoted disciple of the god Nonchaloir, and 
felt no more pressing duty than to set up a poetic court 
at Blois, where the best talent of the age was soon 
assembled. As " an idle singer of an empty day, " he 
had quite peculiar gifts. His favorite subjects are the 
changing seasons and light-hearted lover's fancies, with 
counsels against melancholy and care, and exhortations 
to friendship and good-humor. D' Orleans is never 
great, but he is nearly always healthy and cheerful. 

The Parisian Villon strikes a deeper note. He was 
a greater and a more original poet, though a less worthy 
man. Poor as Euteboeuf, he was even more of a 
reckless vagabond ; and his best work, like his prede- 
cessor's, was in satires, — his " Testaments," in which 
he made mock bequests to various friends and enemies, 
with autobiographical details and allusions that are 

1 These metrical forms are briefly described in Lanson, p. 142, note. 



MIDDLE AGE AND KENASCENCE. 13 

interesting whenever they happen to be still intelli- 
gible. The chief attraction of Villon to-day, however, 
is the short poems interspersed in these long satires, 
some of which bid fair to maintain their place among 
the best lyrics of the world. The " Ballad of the 
Ladies of Long-Ago, " with its refrain, " But where are 
last year's snows/' 1 is familiar to all lovers of poetry. 
Almost as famous is the " Epitaph in the form of a 
Ballad which Villon wrote for himself and his Compan- 
ions when expecting to be hung with them. " In this 
poem of death there is an antinomy of grim humor and 
naive pathos that can hardly be excelled. But though 
in our own day Villon has been called " the first 
French writer who is frankly and completely modern, " 
he will always be the poet of the few, the poets' poet, 
and " caviare to the general. " After his death French 
poets grew steadily more artificial^ endeavoring to atone 
by self-imposed restraints for the lack of genius to rise 
above them, precisely as the Mastersingers were doing 
in contemporary Germany/ and with much the same 
result. 

Meantime, in the drama, the brilliant innovations of 
Adam de la Halle remained unfruitful for a time, while 
the Miracle Play was developing into the Mystery, 
where a freer use of allegory and mythology fostered 
originality and encouraged associations of actors inde- 
pendent of the clergy, or at least apart from them. Such 
companies were quicker to anticipate or respond to pop- 
ular demands ; and in the fifteenth century they pre- 
sented not only the " Fall of Troy, " but the very recent 
siege of Orleans, and the national heroine Joan of Arc, 
whose ashes were hardly cold. But the esprit gaulois has 

1 Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan (Ballade des dames du temps 
jadis). 



14 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

a natural affinity for comedy, and this century revived 
also Adam's happy inspiration in its moral allegories, 
farces, and soties. The first are the most artificial, and 
their vogue may well seem remarkable to a modern 
reader. " La Condemnation du banquet " is perhaps 
the best, yet it is but a wearisome girding at " Glut- 
tony, " who has for his interlocutors such dramatis 
personal as " Dinner, " " Supper, " " Pastime, " " Good- 
Company, " " I-Drink-to-You, " as well as various 
diseases and medical appliances, and a chorus to ob- 
trude the obvious moral. The soties and farces are far 
more interesting. Some of them are comic monologues, 
and occasionally they look like parodies on the ser- 
mons of the time, which themselves are often hardly 
more than parodies, as one may see in the famous dis- 
courses of the Viennese Abraham a Sancta-Clara. But 
the larger part are realistic scenes of middle and low 
life, full of action and often of brutal buffoonery such 
as would appeal to the not very delicate taste of the 
populace. Their spirit, like that of the older fabliaux, 
is one of social distrust, of shrewdness and trickery. 
Charity and gentleness are mocked, astuteness is ad- 
mired. Each man lives in dread of being duped by 
his neighbor. But we have a Frenchman's testimony 
that this is " the lower type of the French nature in its 
pure vulgarity. * l 

Some of these little farces and jests are so short that 
they seem meant to precede or follow a more serious 
performance. Others are long enough for independent 
production, and have no small comic verve. " Le 
Cuvier, " for instance, shows as much dramatic spirit 
as the best of the old fabliaux. A yet more noted 
mediaeval farce is the " Maitre Pathelin" (1470), 

1 Lanson, p. 214. 



MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 15 

which, in the seventeenth century, was worked over 
into a regular comedy that owed its success almost 
wholly to the vis comica of the original ; and two 
sequels in the fifteenth century attest its popularity 
without equalling its merits. 

All of these plays were written in verse, chiefly for 
the benefit of the actors who memorized them, but also 
in deference to tradition. Except in outward form, 
however, they are essentially prosaic, and must have 
gained little but monotony from their couplets and 
long succession of octosyllabic lines. Yet the force of 
this custom has continued almost to our own day, 
though the suppler alexandrine has given some measure 
of relief to comedy and added stateliness to the classic 
tragedy. 

The number of farces that remain is very great, and 
doubtless as many have perished. With them comedy 
is fairly launched, and has never since ceased to be one 
of the most popular and important forms of French 
literature. Meantime the prose that would have been 
in place here, takes in Froissart complete possession of 
the historical field, where Joinville had won only 
toleration. This courtier and diplomat of the later 
fourteenth century (1337-1410), who witnessed much 
of the Hundred Years' War, and busily inquired of 
all he did not see, was able to draw a picture of the 
conflict between France and England that became at 
once immensely popular, and has continued to delight 
boyhood and old age ever since for its vivid pictur- 
esqueness of description and its enthusiastic chivalry 
of sentiment. Froissart is not a meticulously accurate 
historian, still less a social philosopher; but for a 
battle, or a pageant, or a tragic scene like the surren- 
der of Calais, it will be hard to rqatch him in French 



16 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

or, indeed, in any literature. None ever equalled his 
brilliant and sympathetic picture of chivalry, with all 
its high-hearted ideals and all its disdain of the mass 
of humanity. For Froissart the common people hardly 
exist. But the times were even then changing, and a 
keen though untrained interest in the condition of the 
masses is attested by the minute curiosity of Juvenal 
des Ursins and Jean de Troyes, who wrote, somewhat 
later than Froissart, the former of the mad Charles VI. , 
the latter of the shrewd diplomat Louis XI. and his 
scandalous court, that were to furnish to Philippe de 
Commynes the subject of the Memoirs by which he in- 
augurated diplomatic history. 

But perhaps the most important contributor to the 
literary prose of this century was Antoine de la Salie, 
author of the graceful " Petit Jean de Saintre, " of the 
biting " Quinze joies du mariage, " and of the brilliant 
" Cent nouvelles nouvelles. " " Petit Jean " is a pretty 
story of chivalrous love, a pure bit of romantic imagi- 
nation; for ere this Louis XL had made chivalry a 
thing of the past in France. The " Fifteen Joys, " as 
its name implies, is a satire on women, as bright and 
as unjust as the " Eomance of the Eose, " but, unlike 
that famous poem, of far more than antiquarian in- 
terest, for it is still popular in cheap editions on the 
Paris book-stalls. Each of the " Joys" tells of some 
ill-assorted match, and each chapter ends with the 
misery that will come of it to the husband who " shall 
end miserably his days. " The poor fellow is either 
led by the nose, or plundered of his goods, or made a 
laughing-stock to his friends. Some of the character- 
sketches are very lively and dramatic in form, and they 
are well worth reading, in spite of their archaic flavor, 
as specimens of early Eenaissance literature and wit. 



MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 17 

But Antoine de la Salle's great work is the " Cent 
nouvelles nouvelles, " — a collection of tales gathered, 
it was said, from the lips of Prince Louis and his 
courtiers while he was in Burgundy under the protec- 
tion of Duke Philippe, another lover of the esprit 
gaulois. But neither the future Louis XL nor his 
courtiers were the inventors of the best of these tales, 
many of them quite too good to be new. They are 
drawn in part from old fabliaux, in part from Italian 
and Latin collections. But, as with Chaucer and 
Shakspere, it is not in the substance but in the treat- 
ment that De la Salle's individuality lies, and here his 
merit is very great. There had been good naive prose 
in Villehardouin, in Joinville, and in Froissart, but 
De la Salle is the first prose artist who takes an interest 
in his art. His work shows growing artistic sense and 
power. Some of the " Hundred New Tales " are really 
polished, and it added to their effect that they appealed 
to a much wider circle than any other form of writing 
would have done. If at times they have a frankness 
of speech that does not accord with squeamish man- 
ners, their humor on the whole is sound and healthy, 
and nearly always true to human nature, superior in 
this regard to Boccaccio's " Decamerone, " though yield- 
ing of course to that masterpiece in grace of style. It 
may be remarked that De la Salle's efforts for French 
prose were ably seconded by the homilists of the time, 
whose sermons reached another class, and so carried 
the same seed to other fields. 

And now we are on the eve of that wonderful and 
cardinal epoch in the history of the French and indeed 
of the European mind, the Kenaissance. * That all 

1 The remainder of this chapter first appeared in " The Sewanee 
Review," as did also parts of chapters II, III, VIII, and IX. 



18 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

literature, and indeed all forms of national life, are 
processes of evolution, is a truth now almost univer- 
sally recognized among critics worthy of the name; 
but there are periods when external influences seem 
to a superficial observer to interrupt the continuity of 
development, when changes are more rapid and more 
radical than at others ; and from this point of view the 
sixteenth century is absolutely unique in Trench litera- 
ture. For however varied the expression of that age 
may be, protestant, pagan, humanistic, there is in it 
no place and no representative for the manner or the 
matter of mediaeval literature. Calvin, Eabelais, and 
Eonsard drew all of them their inspiration from antiq- 
uity, all of them were practically ready to make a 
tabula rasa of the centuries that separate Augustine 
from Boccaccio, but each went to antiquity with a differ- 
ent mind, and drew from it a different lesson. Calvin 
seeks primitive Christianity ; Eabelais Greek natural- 
ism ; Montaigne the skeptical and practical realism of 
Eome ; Eonsard turns with a passionate longing to the 
sun of classic art. 

So we have to follow out, in this century and in 
those that succeed, three main tendencies, not indeed 
without subdivisions and intertwinings, for literary 
psychology is not a geometric science, and a strict 
classification attains clearness only by inaccuracy ; but 
still as elements sufficiently distinct from one another 
to make it profitable to ask in every case in what pro- 
portion they enter into each great writer's work and 
genius. There is first the temper that recoils from the 
abuses of the Church and from what it regards as the 
accretions of mediaeval ethics, and seeks to restore from 
the Bible, and the Fathers that suit their purpose, a 
" primitive Christianity " to their mind. These are 



MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 19 

the Protestants, the Huguenots, sober, serious, earnest, 
religious men, whom France will miss from her intel- 
lectual and still more from her moral life, when she 
has persecuted and banished them. Uncomfortable, 
intransigent, morose sometimes and bitter like our 
own Puritans, but, after all, the moral salt of the 
earth, whom perhaps one would not like to be one's 
self, but whom one is quite proud to have had for an 
ancestor. Then there are the Gallios, — men who see 
that there is something rotten in the Church of their 
fathers, but do not think that they were born to set it 
right; men who love ease, beauty, grace, and have a 
sort of dilettante joy of life. These are the human- 
ists, who toy with Theocritus and Horace, are fasci- 
nated with Anacreon, and have a more distant admira- 
tion for the truly popular epic of Homer than for the 
courtly epic of Virgil, but who see in it all a play of 
fancy, not a philosophy of life. And finally there are 
the neo-pagans, who find in the bankruptcy of medie- 
valism the bankruptcy of Christianity, who think to 
have done at once with Saint Augustine and with Saint 
Thomas Aquinas, whose ambition is a naive hedonism 
more easy to their age than to ours, who find the old 
Church more tolerant than the new, and so remain as 
a rule nominally Catholic, and are seldom called upon 
to suffer more than temporary inconvenience for their 
thinly masked heresies. 

The causes of this sudden outburst of independent 
thought were numerous, and have been often indicated. 
The discovery of America, and, still more, the dis- 
covery of the solar system, had changed man's point of 
view of his place in Nature. As Faguet 1 observes, 
" The narrow world of the middle ages, with its sky 
1 Seizieme siecle, Avant-propos, p. vii. 



20 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

very low and its God very close, disappeared almost 
suddenly. We were living in a little low house, where 
we were watched from the top of a neighboring tower 
by a severe and good master, who had given us his law, 
followed us with his eyes, sent us frequent messengers, 
protected us, punished us, and held us always in his 
hand. And suddenly we were living in an out-of-the- 
way corner of the immense universe. Heaven with- 
drew into measureless space, and God fled into infin- 
ity. " That knowledge was indeed too wonderful for 
that generation. Many lost for a time the feeling of 
the personality of deity. The science of God might 
be exalted, clarified, but the love of God grew cold, 
and men of philosophic mind felt nearer to the school 
of Athens than to the school of Alexandria or of Hippo, 
far nearer than to the Angelic or to the Mystic Doctor. 
It is a commonplace to connect the renaissance with 
the invention of printing and the spread of classical 
learning, but even here there is perhaps some misap- 
prehension. Many of the classics had been known and 
used by literary men habitually and constantly since 
the age of Bede. The " Romance of the Eose " reeks 
with antiquity of a certain kind; Villon has even 
traces of the classic lyric spirit. Of course, when 
manuscripts of ancient authors were printed, they were 
more widely read. But the point of importance is 
that they were read in a new spirit and seen in a 
wholly new light. For just at the time when print- 
ing was invented, and the inventors looked about them 
for books to print, it happened that the national liter- 
ature was at a low ebb, having indeed been steadily 
degenerating since the thirteenth century in France as 
in Germany, while at the same time it chanced that, 
through the fall of Constantinople and other external 



MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 21 

causes, a vast number of classical manuscripts became 
for the first time available. Hence the books first mul- 
tiplied — with some natural exceptions, such as the 
" Bible " and the " Imitation of Christ " — were the clas- 
sics ; and these books thus obtained a vantage ground 
in the minds of the reading public that they could 
hardly have attained had they been obliged to contest 
the favor of the once popular writers of the thirteenth 
century, whom time and the widening of the human 
mind had now crowded from view. This, again, has 
been admirably expressed by Faguet : " On one side 
were the classics and the writings of the sixteenth 
century, printed, portable, legible, inconceivably mul- 
tiplied ; on the other side the mediaeval books, manu- 
scripts, hard to handle, to take in, to read, or to find. 
So printing gradually suppressed the middle ages, 
and by presenting antiquity and the sixteenth century 
to eye and mind under the same forms, in the same 
styles and types, and as it were in the same language, 
it expressed and asserted emphatically that continua- 
tion of antiquity by the sixteenth century that was 
dimly in all minds, and cast, in like measure, the 
middle ages into the shade as though they had not 
been. " 2 Herein lies the significance of the word 
" renaissance/'* — a new birth of an old life after ages 
of quiescence which men despise and make haste to 
forget, almost as much repelled by their own tradition 
as they are attracted to a foreign past. It was a state 
of mind unique in history, and full of the germs of 
political, social, and literary revolution. 

The three elements — pagan, humanistic, and protes- 
tant — manifest themselves throughout Europe, but with 
different degrees and results. In Germany the renas- 
1 Faguet, Seizieme siecle, x. 



22 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

cence is ethical, religious. The voice of the human- 
ists is feeble and soon lost in domestic strife, while 
the pagan element was never deeply rooted among 
them. Here, therefore, the classical renaissance is 
deferred for more than three centuries, to spring, like 
a fully armed Pallas, from the brain of Lessing, and 
to be the presiding genius of the ideal humanist, 
Goethe. In England, too, the religious side predom- 
inates, but always mingled with humanism ; while in 
the Italy of Boccaccio and the France of Eonsard the 
movement is more literary, artistic, and at most crypto- 
pagan, except for the Huguenots, whose spirit in liter- 
ature hardly extends beyond Calvin and D'Aubigne. 
Here the normal state of mind is humanistic, eclectic, 
" with a Christian soul and a pagan art, " — an illogical 
compromise that reaches its supreme expression in 
Chateaubriand, though it can be seen almost every- 
where and always in France, as for instance in 
Boileau's exclusion of Christian mysteries from the 
domain of poetry, and in the resulting impersonality 
of the whole literature of the classic school. The 
pagan element in the renaissance, on the contrary, has 
predominated only during a part of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, though it is fundamentally the spirit of Eabelais, 
of Montaigne, of La Fontaine and of Molikre. This 
spirit is opposed equally to Catholicism and to Protes- 
tantism, while the humanists content themselves with 
reprobating the latter and its congener, Jansenism. 
The triumph of the pagan renaissance in the age of 
Voltaire was, however, short. The spirit of the ency- 
clopaedists yielded to that of the " Genius of Chris- 
tianity," while the revival of the pagan tradition has in 
it an element of Jansenism, and the Eeformers have 
become Free-Thiukers. Since the Eomantic School the 



MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 23 

mark of the period has been a varied individualism. 
There is no longer one Spirit of the Time, but many- 
spirits. 

If now we return to the sixteenth century and seek 
in it the expression of these various tendencies, we 
shall find that this age of singular activity owes little 
to its immediate predecessor, save a style to which De 
la Salle had given a graceful suppleness and the homi- 
lists an oratorical flow. In every kind of literary art 
this century advances by leaps, spurred to activity 
first and most by the example of the Italian renais- 
sance, for the ambition of their kings had brought 
them into repeated and close though disastrous con- 
tact with that ancient home of art, but impelled also 
by the revival of learning at home, and by the reli- 
gious ferment, which was spread by printing and the 
accompanying diffusion of primary knowledge, and 
grew, like yeast, by what it fed on. There is noth- 
ing to compare in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries 
with the prose satire of the " Menippde " or the barbed 
verses of D'Aubign£; nothing to match the lyrics of 
Marot, still less of Eonsard ; nothing like the criticism 
of Du Bellay or the dignified drama of Jodelle ; no such 
fiction as blossomed beneath the dainty fingers of 
Queen Marguerite; no such wit as Beroald's and Des 
Pdriers' ; above all, nothing to match the stern force of 
Calvin, the marvellous well-spring of Kabelais' humor, 
or the novel charm of Montaigne's essays. Nor must 
we forget the numerous translations that now first 
betray a restless search for new inspirations. The 
drooping taste for idealized adventure receives a fillip 
from a version of " Amadis of Gaul, " the great ro- 
mance of Spanish chivalry. Amyot turns into prose 
that may still arouse admiration, " Daphnis and 



24 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

Chloe, " that exquisite pastoral of the Greek Longus, as 
well as Plutarch's lives of the great men of Greece and 
Kome, that became a repertory for the novelists and 
dramatists of the next century. It is clear already 
that we have to deal with a remarkable diversity of 
genius. Indeed this is, like our own, a century of 
literary independence, with few rules, save the " Do 
what thou wilt" of Kabelais' Abbey of Thelema, and 
no enduring literary schools or traditions. It was 
not till its very close that the ethical and artistic aspi- 
rations of the renaissance were chastened and united by 
Malherbe, who " joined with a somewhat heavy hand 
antique art to modern rationalism, " and, though him- 
self a little man, owes to greater followers the distinc- 
tion of being first in the classical period. 

The poetry of the century, with the exception of a 
portion, and that perhaps not the best, of D'Aubign^'s 
verse, is humanistic, continuing with greater resources 
and greater zeal the study of classic art that was 
already an old tradition in France. But while the 
middle ages had sought their inspiration chiefly in the 
more accessible Latin writers, in Ovid and Boethius, 
in Livy and the essays of Cicero, Marot, the first of the 
renaissance poets who need detain our attention, knew 
and valued Virgil, Martial, Lucian, and the pseudo- 
Musseus ; while Eonsard, with his fellows of the Pleiad, 
seems often to have judged the value of an acquisition 
by its difficulty, prizing Pindar more than Homer, and 
finding his most genuine delight first in Petrarch, then 
in Anacreon. 

Clement Marot (1497-1544) had the happy fortune 
to unite northern blood to southern birth, and to com- 
bine many of the virtues of each. In his ethics he 
was a sort of dilettante reformer, of the type that 



MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 25 

gathered at the court of the broad-minded and tolerant 
Princess Marguerite, afterward Queen of Navarre, her- 
self a lyric poet, whose " Marguerites " show a consider- 
able development of that personal note which the 
Pleiad, Malherbe, and Boileau were to deaden in Prance 
till the rise of the Eomantic School. Under her 
patronage Marot furthered religious disintegration by 
his translation of the Psalms, which was very popular, 
even after it was condemned by the Sorbonne as smack- 
ing of heresy. Here the subject lent him a dignity 
that his other work is apt to lack, being in the main 
pretty rather than beautiful, light rather than strong, 
graceful rather than grand. His great service to French 
verse is that he did for it what the " Cent nouvelles 
nouvelles " had already done for its prose. He restored 
naturalism and simplicity. For the artificial excess of 
ornament and allegory he substituted his native grace 
and delicacy. 1 He is now, and probably vrill always 
be, most read for his lighter work, — for his songs, 
epistles, epigrams, animal fables, and the nonsense 
verses, the " Coq-a-Pane. " And even in these fields 
he is chiefly known by a very few pieces de resistance 
of the reading-books and anthologies. All school-boys 
know " The Rat and the Lion, " most will have read 
Marot's deliciously naive begging letter to King Fran- 
cis I. (Epist. 11 and 28); but to one who has read the 
whole body of his work, the songs, satirical or con- 
vivial, such as " Frfere Lubin, " "Dedans Paris," or 
" Au bon vieux temps, " will seem more characteristic 
of his natural diversity, and give us a more human 
sympathy with one who was always a good fellow, and 

1 The instinct of beauty occasionally fails him, yet he falls but 
seldom into such crass naturalism as that of " Le Laid teton," a com* 
panion piece to Baudelaire's " Charogne." 



26 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

always seemed so when it was not for his interest to cut 
a long face. 

Marot's imitators were usually more serious, always 
less talented than he, though to one of them, Saint™ 
Gdlais, French verse owes the introduction of the 
Italian sonnet. The Calvinistic satirist, Agrippa 
d'Aubignd (1550-1630), though of a much later period, 
shared Marot's sympathies rather than those of the free- 
thinking Pleiad, of whom he is sometimes called a 
" rebellious " follower. His trenchant satires did 
much to establish the domination of the alexandrine 
verse that Eonsard had preached rather than practised. 
They were also the first worthy work in the manner of 
Juvenal that France has to show. But even before 
Marot's death a group of young talents had gathered 
at the College Coqueret, whose influence was to be 
temporarily greater and more lasting in some of its 
phases than that of any which had preceded them. 
This " Pleiad " of genius supplemented what was best 
in Marot's naturalism with a fuller measure of the 
classical spirit, and so set French literature, both in its 
substance, its form, and its language, in new paths, 
which those who afterward most blamed their early 
excesses were most zealous silently to follow. The 
Pleiad was first in France to preach and practise par- 
ticular heed to the cadence of the single verse, while 
lyric poets before them had regarded the stanza as the 
unit in poetic composition. It was also first to reprove 
and regulate the once unbridled license of newly 
coined words and phrases, though even their liberal 
culture went farther in this than following generations 
were willing to follow. With delicate feeling they 
laid stress on the choice and place of words in poetic 
composition, and completed the discredit of an artificial 



MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 27 

and rhetorical style against which Marot had already 
raised the standard of revolt. But while Marot had 
the tact to " choose the wheat and let the chaff be still " 
in the traditional forms, he introduced into literature 
no new blood. With Eonsard and his brothers of the 
Pleiad the case is different. They were conscious inno- 
vators ; their advent could not have been anticipated, 
and is indeed almost a unique fact in literary history. 
It was probably in 1541 that Pierre de Eonsard 
(1524-1585), then a travelled young soldier of eighteen, 
left his profession, and the promise of a brilliant 
career, for studious retirement at Paris and the prized 
instructions of Daurat, who presently began to gather 
about him a group of enthusiastic young scholars, such 
as might have been sought in vain elsewhere in 
France. Belleau and Baif had preceded Eonsard ; Du 
Bellay he brought back from a journey to Poictiers; 
Jodelle and Pontus de Tyard soon joined them to com- 
plete their " brigade, " — a name that their number, 
seven, led them to exchange for Pleiad, when, in 1549, 
the group first ventured to break their studious silence, 
and to proclaim their views and purposes in the " De- 
fense et illustration de la langue franqaise, " ostensibly 
by Du Bellay, but really a joint manifesto of the 
school. The purpose of this famous pamphlet is to 
urge its readers who have entered the classical camp 
" to escape from the midst of the Greeks and through 
the ranks of the Eomans, and to come back to the 
heart of their own well -beloved France," that they 
may bring with them from those foreign literatures 
what may be profitable to their own. Now, any man 
who reads widely in the writings of the fifteenth and 
sixteenth centuries will find the conviction grow that 
French, as a vehicle of literary expression for the 



28 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

renaissance mind, was in need of just that new blood 
that could be drawn from the school of Petrarch and 
from the revival of classical studies, the source 
whence Italy had already drawn its fuller life. The 
men of the Pleiad were no Chauvinists, but yet they 
were thoroughly national and patriotic in their aims, 
and quick to learn from their own errors, as well as 
from those of their erudite predecessors, 1 so that their 
last work is among their best. In them the humanism 
of the French renaissance reaches its fullest expression, 
while of the ethical and philosophic phase of the move- 
ment they have hardly a trace. 

Typical of all, except Jodelle, is Ronsard ; he alone 
is still generally read by cultured men, apart from 
special studies, and of him alone it is necessary to 
speak here. His literary life was a constant triumph. 
Almost from the outset, and until his death, he was 
easily first at court and in the popular esteem ; and he 
held this place after his death, though in Desportes and 
less talented imitators among the classical decadents, 
the blood of the French muse began to run thin, till 
Malherbe gave a new life to Ronsard 's revival of classic 
taste by infusing it with the rationalistic spirit. 

Ronsard asserted his pre-eminence by his mastery 
of the language and of metre, and by a poetic imagi- 
nation, without which the most skilful rhymester is 
only an artisan. In language he encouraged his readers 
to " a wise boldness in inventing new words, so long 
as they were moulded and fashioned on a pattern already 
recognized by the people. " He might have said, with 
-Dante, that language never constrained him to say 
what he would not ; but he had often constrained lan- 
guage to say what it would not, though in this regard 
1 Especially Le Maire de Beiges, Heroet, and Maurice Sceve. 



MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 29 

the sum of his offending does not exceed two hundred 
words. However the case may be now in academic 
France, Eonsard understood for his time exactly what 
it meant to have a mastery of his own tongue; and 
though perhaps he strained too much at foreign forms, 
neglecting the poetic worth that lay in the popular 
speech, yet in his prose as in his verse there was a 
vigor and a brilliancy that had not been equalled, and 
was not exceeded till the appearance of Montaigne's 
"Essays." 

It is curious to note that this crystallization of mod- 
ern prose which Eonsard inaugurated in France, had 
its parallels in the contemporary literatures of Ger- 
many, Spain, and England. In every case it was 
political unity that gave the first impulse and forced 
the dialects into subordination to the dominant speech 
of the court. Eonsard began for the French language 
very much what Luther accomplished for the German, 
and in prosody also he was an innovator and a re- 
former. He failed indeed to revive the Pindaric ode, 
the value of which for modern use he greatly exagger- 
ated; but he restored the alexandrine to its place of 
honor, though he did not always follow his own teach- 
ing. He was also first to popularize the sonnet, and 
he introduced an endless variety of lyric stanzas, whose 
metres were as graceful as they were original. It is 
here that his best work is to be sought, in the groups 
called " Amours, " " Gaiet^s, " and in the later odes, 
rather than in the classical eclogues and odes, or in 
the unfinished epic, " La Franciade. " Anthologies 
never fail to cite " Mignonne, allons voir si la rose, " 
and the sonnet to Hdlkne beginning " Quand vous serez 
bien vieille ; " and they seldom omit the " Drenched 
Cupid," — a subject borrowed from Anacreon, and 



30 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

interesting because it admits a comparison with La 
Fontaine. But, charming as these are, it is only pre- 
scription that causes them to be so uniformly preferred 
to a score of others, filled with the peculiar naivete and 
flavor of the renaissance that later centuries so seldom 
recover. " La petite colombelle " yields nothing in the 
comparison with Catullus that it naturally suggests ; 
and " Cupid's School," borrowed from Bion, is treated 
in a way to put the creditor under obligations to his 
debtor. Then, too, there is " L'Alouette" (the Sky- 
lark), as characteristic of France and of his century as 
Shelley's is of England and of his. Eonsard is a poet 
in the fresh vigor of hope. He is not looking with 
the Englishman's forlorn hope from some Euganean 
hill for the " green isles that needs must be in the 
deep, wide sea of misery ; " his Skylark is a charming 
bird to be enjoyed, not to be yearned for as the symbol 
of what she is not. There is hardly ever a morbid 
strain in his verses, for Eonsard at his best is the poet 
of a free and healthy naturalism. Hence the last half- 
century has been peculiarly favorable to a revival of his 
fame, which has betrayed some enthusiasts into an ex- 
cessive admiration. He lacked clear aesthetic stan- 
dards because he lacked intellectual independence ; but 
the fact remains that no French poet before Victor Hugo 
is so much in sympathy with the spirit of our age as 
Eonsard, while at the same time no poet has a more 
cheerful note or a more needed message to this pessi- 
mistic generation. 

Eonsard lived a happy, hopeful life, and the peace- 
ful current of his declining years was crowned with the 
" honor, love, obedience, troops of friends, " that should 
accompany it, and with a peaceful and holy death 
(December 27, 1585). A hopeful, healthy joy of life, 



MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 31 

rarely crossed by a querulous cloud, remained with 
him, as with Goethe, to the end. Just so far as this 
temper has prevailed in it, French literature has been 
strong and helpful. Eonsard did more than any one 
man to form the literary language of France. It was 
his humanism, corrected, modified, and then ignored 
by Malherbe, that dominated the age of Louis XIV. , 
though it was reserved for our own to restore to him 
his long neglected honor. " The classical spirit was 
formed in accord with him, without him, and appar- 
ently in opposition to him. He had it, he did not 
inspire it. He is the final type of it, and he is not its 
founder ; he is its first date, and he is not its source. 
But that is no fault of his. " 1 

In the drama the Pleiad, represented by Jodelle 
(1532-1573), was less original and more classical in 
tone. His " Cleopatra " is the first " regular " tragedy, 
the first that answers to the distorted conception he 
had formed of the Aristotelian unities, and his 
" Eugene " is the first " regular " comedy. Both were 
studied, as was all his work, more from the Latin than 
from the Greek ; but, defective if not mistaken as was 
his critical conception, his ideas were so in accord 
with the French spirit on its good and its weak side, 
that they were industriously imitated, till at the close 
of the century (1599) Alexander Hardy began the 
rehabilitation of the national drama at the Hotel de 
Bourgogne, till then still occupied by the mysteries of 
the Confraternity of the Passion. 

The first noteworthy prose work of the sixteenth 

century, the " Memoirs " of Philippe de Commynes 

(1445-1511), belongs rather to the fifteenth; but as 

it was not published till 1524, his effect on the 

1 Faguet, Seizieme siecle, 287. 



32 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

literature of the time must be considered with that of 
the men of the early French renaissance. What 
strikes one most in the man's writing, as in his life, 
is his practical and modern common-sense. For the 
knight-errantry of Froissart he substitutes a diplo- 
matic shrewdness and a wide curiosity that always fol- 
lows the what with the why. Successively the servant 
of Charles the Bold, of Louis XL, and of Charles 
VIII. , he guarded beneath his diplomacy the naive 
faith of a man whose own experience is full of riddles 
that some sort of providence alone is able to solve ; but 
he joins to this an equally naive belief in shrewdness 
and a distrust of over-boldness in the affairs of the 
world. This undogmatic religiosity is a modern trait; 
modern, too, are his curiosity, his democratic sympathies, 
and the natural restraint of his narrative that rarely 
passes beyond the limits of his immediate observa- 
tion. Though himself little touched by the renais- 
sance, his attitude toward the Church ranks him 
among the ancestors of the humanists, of whom in- 
deed there is a long line reaching far back into the 
thirteenth century. 

On the other hand, Calvin (1509-1564) represented 
the new spirit of intransigent reform, the attempted 
restoration of primitive Christianity. Trained both 
for theplogy and law, he joined in after life the doctor 
to the lawgiver, and became at once the Moses and the 
Aaron of the chosen people who left the flesh-pots of 
their French bondage to gather in the Genevan 
Canaan. With his teaching we have nothing to do 
here save to note its revolt against medievalism ; but 
the sober logic and classical polish of his style give 
him a very high place — if we regard form alone, the 
highest place — among the prose writers of his century. 



MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 33 

It is sober sense enforced with a lapidarian clearness 
and precision, and therefore lacking somewhat in sym- 
pathy and imagination, bent on commanding rather 
than winning assent, on being understood rather than 
on being loved ; here, too, " the style is the man, " — 
stern, imperious, lofty, sincere, and sombre, 1 at once 
borne up and borne down by the all-pervading sense 
of the immanence of deity. But in the less competent 
hands of his imitators and successors his style inevi- 
tably degenerated to pedantic heaviness, though not 
until it had shown the unguessed powers of French for 
accurate exposition and subtle disputation. 

But this century of renascence was distinguished no 
less and characterized much better by Eabelais, a 
remarkably keen and learned man, who spent his 
life in ridiculing with the most bitter satire what he 
still professed to believe. In his career, as in his 
work, there appears at first sight a constant vein of 
insincerity, a Mephistophelian spirit that sees the 
weak, the laughable, the ridiculous side of that which 
it holds dearest and holiest ; but when work and life 
are more closely examined, Eabelais' spirit seems 
rather that of a profound philosopher who discerns 
the essential antinomy in all apprehension of human 
truth, so that he rises far above the mere mockery of 
Lucian or the diabolic ferocity of Swift. Traces of the 
same philosophic attitude can be found in Eeuchlin, 
in Erasmus, and in other doctors of the Eeformation, 
more learned than bold; but it is in France that this 

1 He tries occasionally to lighten his sermons with some metaphor 
from common life or even with vulgar dialect; but it is heavy fooling, 
and one feels that he shakes with awkward reluctance this cap and 
bells. See for instances, as well as for a keen study of Calvin's doc- 
trine, Faguet, Seizieme siecle, 127-197, and especially 192-193. 

3 



34 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

spirit can be most frequently and constantly noted, 
and the unchallenged leader of its representatives is 
Francois Kabelais (1495-1553), who is the most com- 
plete reflection of the too sanguine hopes of the pagan 
renaissance, of its serious aspirations, its over-hasty 
generalizations, and its joy of life. 

Rabelais' satire is put into the form of a burlesque 
romance of adventures ; but the form is a very thin 
disguise, and the thread of the narrative is of the slen- 
derest. Throughout, his real interest is in destructive 
criticism of the political and social conditions of his 
time. His mind became constructive only when 
stirred by the worthlessness of mediaeval education or 
by the abuses of decaying monasticism. The five 
books * of his great satire, which differ sufficiently from 
one another to be treated as separate works, appeared 
at various times between 1532 and 1564, when Eabe- 
lais had already been eleven years dead, and beyond 
the reach both of the just indignation and of the petty 
partisan hate that had pursued him through all his 
mature years. The first book bears the title " Gar- 
gantua, " the others " Pantagruel ; " and it is these that 
merit both the greatest admiration and the greatest 
reprobation. They are probably more studied to-day 
than any other work of the time. They are more 
witty, more caustic, more profoundly skeptical, more 
unscrupulous, and more unclean than any other book 
of that age. Indeed their coarseness is perhaps un- 
paralleled in literature, and serves to hide both the 
author's wit and his political and pedagogic wisdom. 
That he should have begun life as a monk, while only 

1 Brunetiere, Lanson, and other critics hold that the fifth book is a 
Huguenot pamphlet of another man and time, though posthumous 
papers of Rabelais were used in its composition. 



MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 35 

his voluntary resignation prevented his ending it as 
a cur£, illustrates the condition of the Church. In 
the interval between his leaving the Franciscan clois- 
ter of Fontenay le Conte and his entry into the pres- 
bytery of Meudon, he had been a Benedictine canon, 
a wandering scholar, a student of medicine, a scien- 
tist, physician to a diplomatic ambassador, and a 
voluntary exile. 

Eabelais' book as a whole plays less part in litera- 
ture than some of the characters in it. Gargantua, 
the giant father of Pantagruel, was generally recog- 
nized as typical of the good-humored, easy-going roy- 
alty of Francis I. Panurge, the companion and servant 
of Pantagruel, and more interesting than his master, 
embodies, as Saintsbury says, " a somewhat diseased 
intellectual refinement, and the absence of morality in 
the wide Aristotelian sense, with the presence of 
almost all other good qualities. " " He is the principal 
triumph of Eabelais' character-drawing, and the most 
original, as well as the most puzzling, figure in the 
book. A coward, a drunkard, a lecher, a spiteful 
trickster, a spendthrift, but all the while infinitely 
amusing. " 1 Opposed to him is the lusty animalism 
of Friar John, whose famous Abbey of Thelema, with 
its hedonistic motto, " Do what thou wilt, " represents 
Eabelais' ideal of the " natural life," and the negation 
of all the restraints, moral and social, that he had 
learned to know and to hate in his monastic experi- 
ence. A considerable part of the whole is occupied 
with Panurge' s debate with himself and with Pan- 
tagruel as to whether he shall marry, his deliciously 
humorous recourse to all manner of authorities on 

1 Short History of French Literature, p. 186. Encyc. Brit.., art. 
Rabelais, vol. xx. p. 196. 



36 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

this matter of universal interest, and his final deter- 
mination to consult the oracle of the " Dive Bouteille, " 
which, after various adventures that offer scope to un- 
bridled satire, finally gives the truly oracular response, 
" Trinq " (drink), as the solution of this and all other 
riddles of earth. 

Of the serious parts of Babelais' work the best are 
probably the scattered chapters on the education of 
Pantagruel, which show great originality and force, 
and a remarkable anticipation of the modern scientific 
spirit. But usually, however earnestly Eabelais may 
feel, his zealous optimism will find some grotesque 
mask for its expression. Of this comic vein the most 
striking feature is the unique and astounding vocabu- 
lary. He will pile up huge lists of cooks or of fan- 
tastic meats, of dances and of games, or he will take 
some noun and heap around it all conceivable adjec- 
tives, sometimes arraying them by the hundreds in 
columns. 1 The reader is led through as devious paths 
as those of Tristram Shandy's autobiography. There 
is a psychological analysis of wonderful keenness, a 
profusion of learning, a carnival of wit and imagina- 
tion, the loftiest thoughts and the vilest fancies, all 
woven together into a mighty maze by " pantagruel- 
ism, " — a militant faith in nature and instinct that by 
its robust humor and the solvent of its destructive 
satire becomes the extreme type of the pagan phase of 
the renaissance, the source of the eighteenth-century 
ethics and of modern French realism. 

For independence of all ascetic restraint is Eabelais* 
philosophy of life, as it had been that of Jean de 
Meung, and was to be that of Voltaire. But its in- 

1 Books i. 22, v. 33, bis. Book iii. 26 has a list of 157 adjectives, 
and iii. 38 a list of 210. 



MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 37 

consistency with mediaeval Christianity seems more 
obvious to us than it did to him, who remained all his 
life nominally and doubtless sincerely a Catholic, 
though to him the yoke was certainly lighter than to 
most who make a Christian profession. Still there is 
nothing authentic in his work that can be construed 
into a direct attack on the faith. His position was 
like that of Erasmus. He was irreverent at times ; but 
those who find an evidence of infidelity in this, or in 
his monumental filthiness of speech, are usually 
unacquainted with the common language of his con- 
temporaries and predecessors of the ages of faith. Ex- 
perience has shown that these things are less matters 
of morality than of taste and feeling, of age and race. 
Eabelais had more wit than the rest, and so did 
better what many tried to do. They have sunk in 
their mire to oblivion, but the impurity of Eabelais is 
like an unclean insect wrapped in amber. He must 
be judged by his time ; and even at his coarsest it is 
always honest fun that inspires his rollicking laugh, 
never the prurient toying with voluptuousness and the 
sniggering of the eighteenth-century professors of the 
science of erotics. 

The world-wisdom of Eabelais was much that of 
Goethe. Both were men of vast learning. Goethe had 
a wider and more delicate culture. Eabelais had, what 
Goethe greatly lacked, a deeper humor than any other 
Frenchman, and one of the richest the world has ever 
known. So the expression of their common thought is 
radically different ; but both believed in the worth of 
life, and that that worth could be realized and en- 
hanced by the freest development of the whole nature 
of man, unhampered by ascetic or other artificial tram- 
mels in ethics or philosophy. Yet it is the fate of the 



38 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

humorist that his humor should mask his more serious 
thought; and Rabelais, while he has been admired 
by many and imitated by a few, has not had the in- 
fluence on the thought or the writing of later genera- 
tions that might have been anticipated from his great 
genius. 

But while Rabelais was thus mocking the inconsis- 
tent follies of mankind, a group of talented men whom 
the open-hearted hospitality of Marguerite (1492-1549) 
had gathered at her court, was developing, by the 
introduction of tragic sympathy and artistic finish, the 
traditions of the prose fabliaux so well inaugurated 
in the " Cent nouvelles nouvelles. " 1 The year 1558 
was made memorable by the publication of the " Hep- 
tameron, " which sprang from the immediate circle 
of that royal lady, and by the " Joyeux devis " of Des 
Periers, the only frank skeptic of his time, whose 
" Cymbalum mundi " earned him a persecution that 
drove him at last to suicide (1544). His work hardly 
marks an advance, except in style, on De la Salle. 
The anecdotes are short, crisp, witty, but with no 
trace of growing refinement or culture. The seventy- 
two tales of the " Heptameron, " on the other hand, are 
epoch-making in the aesthetics of prose fiction, because 
they join to the joy of life that pulses with healthy 
vigor through all the early pagan renaissance, a refine- 
ment of manners and morals and a grace of conception 
that belongs rather to the humanists, and a delicacy 
of observation and description that is peculiarly its 
own. 

Meantime the traditions of Rabelais were continued 
in the latter half of the century by the " Apologie pour 

1 Nicolas de Troyes and Noel du Fail are still earlier imitators of 
De la Salle, but intrinsically of less importance. 



MIDDLE AGE AND EENASCENCE. 39 

Hdrodote " of the scholarly Henri Estienne, 1 a very 
amusing attack on the clergy of the time that did 
much to aid in fixing the classical language of the next 
century. Then, as a belated fruit of this epoch, there 
appeared, in 1610, Beroald de Verville's " Moyen de 
parvenir, " a curious mixture of wit, learning, and vul- 
garity, with a plenteous store of anecdotes that might 
have furnished him with another " Cent nouvelles " if 
he had not preferred to strew them in the freakish 
dialogue of his mad fratrasie. Between him and Des 
P^riers, both in style and time, is the Abbd de Bran- 
tome (1540-1614), ostensibly a writer of contemporary 
biography, but really a laughing collector of piquant 
and scandalous stories of the dames de par le monde, 
told with great gusto and considerable power of char- 
acter painting, so that his works are reprinted and still 
read. 

Prose satire first at this period became an important 
political weapon in the " M^nipp^e, " that several lib- 
eral and patriotic Catholics directed against the League 
and its desperate defence of Paris in 1593 ; while in his 
" Essays " Montaigne had already created a new type of 
prose writing that has gained little at the hands of his 
successors, for the inventor of the essay is still the 
most popular essayist. 

The exuberant hopes of the pagan renaissance, as 
they appeared in the joyous nature-worship of Eabelais, 
had not been fulfilled, and to that period of generous 
expansion there had succeeded a reaction to easy egoism 
and unaggressive skepticism. This is the temper in 

1 Otherwise known as Henry Stephens, from his association with 
the English reformers in 1550. He was the most illustrious of a fa- 
mous family of French scholars and printers. See Encyc. Brit., xxii. 
534 sqq. 



40 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

which Montaigne chooses the devices "What do I 
know ? " and " What does it matter ? " He had been a 
boy of scholarly and sedentary tastes, and carefully 
trained in the classics. His manhood, though un- 
eventful, was such as to bring him in contact with all 
phases of life ; and his ripe experience has as its fruit 
the " Essays," of which two books appeared in 1580, 
and the more important third book in 1588. No 
French work has exercised so great and lasting an influ- 
ence on the writing and thought of the world. 1 Mon- 
taigne here inaugurates the literature of the public 
confessional, of loquacious egotism. His " Essays " 
are indeed, as he says, " a book of good faith. " He 
takes us into his confidence, and rambles on in 
delicious and not unmethodical desultoriness. The 
essays sprang, no doubt, from such note-books as 
scholarly men used to keep in that age, and gradually 
rounded themselves into their present form from a few* 
connected thoughts. In the last series, however, 
there is far more conscious composition, and these 
essays are nearly four times as long as the earlier ones. 
The subjects are very varied, and the titles are often 
mere pegs to hang ideas upon. There is not much 
about Virgil nor even about Latin poetry in the essay 
on the " Verses of Virgil, " and there is still less about 
coaches in " Des Coches. " Nowhere is there any trace 
of searching for subject or effect. He notes what comes 
into his mind, and as it comes ; he tells us what he 
thinks about what happens to interest him. His work 
has all the charm of nature and not a little of hidden 
art. 2 

1 Montesquieu's " Spirit of Laws " had more influence on politics, 
and Rousseau's novels on the feelings and life of two generations. 

2 Montaigne was translated into English hy Florio in time to be 
used by Shakspere, and Florio has had many and distinguished sue- 



MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 41 

In his style and vocabulary Montaigne profited by 
Eonsard, but he was no blind follower. He saw the 
danger of indiscriminate innovation. " Keen minds " 
he says, " bring no new words into the language, but 
with a cautious ingenuity they apply to it unaccus- 
tomed mutations. And, " he adds in words that might 
apply as well to the symbolists of our day as to the 
rhetoriqueurs of his own, " how little it is in the 
power of all to do this appears in very many French 
writers of this century. They are bold enough and 
disdain to follow the beaten track ; but lack of 
invention and of discretion ruins them. Their work 
reveals only a wretched affectation of singularity, with 
cold and absurd metaphors that amuse rather than 
elevate their subject. If only such men can gorge 
themselves with what is novel, they are indifferent to 
what is effective. To seize the new they will abandon 
the usual, which is often the stronger and the more 
vigorous. " 

It cannot be denied that Montaigne's average prose 
is better than the average prose of Eonsard, and his 
best is almost the best that France has to show. 
Naturally, therefore, it was the subject of narrow criti- 
cism by Malherbe and the early Academicians. But 
while Balzac and Vaugelas fettered and puttered, and 
while Boileau taught the French muse to pick her 
cautious way along the strait and narrow path of 
his coldly objective classicism, while the Pleiad 
was discredited and Eonsard forgotten save by La 
Bruyfere, the naturalists of the sixteenth century lived 
stubbornly on. Eabelais and Montaigne were still 

cessors. On Montaigne there is an essay in Emerson's " Representative 
Men " and two excellent books by Panl Stapf er, — " Montaigne," in the 
Grands €crivains frangais, and " LaFamille et les amis de Montaigne." 



42 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

widely read, and their unfettered independence did 
much to shorten the triumph of literary absolutism, 
just as the tendency of their thought contributed to 
shorten the reign of political tyranny. It was not 
until wise rules had been broken together with cramp- 
ing fetters by the Eomantic revolt that Eonsard was 
restored to honor by precisely that movement in 
French literature with which he has least in common ; 
but no revolution of taste or criticism has ever shaken 
the universal recognition of the greatness of Eabelais 
and Montaigne. 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 43 



CHAPTEE II. 

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTUEY. 1 

" At last Malherbe came. " With these words or this 
thought it has been customary, ever since Boileau's 
time, to begin the study of the classical century of 
French literature. According to him, Malherbe was 
first in France to introduce a correct cadence into 
prosody. He first " taught the force of a rightly 
placed word, and brought back the muse to the rules of 
duty. " He improved the language so that " it offered 
nothing rude to the cultured ear ; " he banished en- 
jambement, or the interlocking of verses, and " taught 
stanzas to close with grace. " 2 This appreciation by 
one mediocre artisan in verse of the merits of another, 
if perhaps not altogether " false in fact and imbecile 
in criticism," is certainly a great exaggeration; but it 
represents fairly enough the sentiment of the age of 

1 There is helpful criticism for the period covered by this chapter 
in Petit de Julleville, Histoire de la langue et de la litte'rature francaise, 
vol. iii. ; Faguet, xvii. siecle ; Brunetiere, Etudes critiques and Evolution 
des genres ; Le Breton, Le Roman au xvii. siecle ; Morillot, Le Roman 
en France; Lanson, Litterature francaise; and Korting, Geschichte des 
franzosischen Romans im XVII Jahrhunderts. 

2 Malherbe, b. 1556, d. 1628. Boileau's lines paraphrased above 
are : — 

Enfin Malherbe vint, et le premier en France, 
Fit sentir dans les vers une juste cadence, 
D'un mot mis a sa place enseigna le pouvoir, 
Et reduisit la muse aux regies du devoir. 
Par ce sage e'crivain la langue preparee 
N'offrit plus rien de rude a l'oreille epure'e. 



44 MODEKN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

Louis XIV. , while the fateful error it involved was 
portentous to French lyric poetry for more than two 
centuries of pseudo-classical artificiality and stagna- 
tion. The qualities on which Boileau insists are met- 
rical polish, meticulous accuracy in rhymes, greater 
diligence in the rhetorical arrangement, and a more 
anxious care in the choice of words, the whole joining 
in what might be justly described as a zealous and un- 
tiring pursuit of the commonplace. As might be an- 
ticipated, then, Malherbe will never shock, but he 
will never thrill. There is no flash of genius in the 
poems, and, so far as can be seen, there was none in 
the man. Why, then, were these qualities, that fifty 
years before would not have raised a poet above name- 
less mediocrity, capable of making a leader in 1600 ? 
What peculiar conjuncture made readers turn from 
the kernel to the husk ? What suffered the genius of 
E^gnier to be a voice crying in the wilderness, while 
a vastly inferior poet became the prophet of successive 
generations till the Eevolution came to make all things 
new ? 

To understand this aberration of aesthetic taste 
we must look beyond literature to the political and 
religious world. The renaissance had been a period 
of unrest, of reaching out in untried directions of ten- 
tative effort, of a confident iconoclasm, too, and of 
strongly developed individualism. This is the spirit 
of the earlier half of the sixteenth century. Then 
follows a growing lack of faith in the new learning 
as a panacea for human ills ; but as yet there is no 
loss of individuality. Each writer strikes out on his 
own line, cares little for precedent or law in language 
or metre, so that he can say what he has in him to 
say. Originality is more prized than correct diction, 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 45 

strength than polish. So while these men left admi- 
rable work behind them, each writer's legacy to the 
world was stamped with a singularity that made it 
little adapted to form a school or train a succession. 
The renaissance had sacrificed the old principle of 
authority to freedom of inquiry in many departments 
of intellectual and ethical life. In literature this free- 
dom resulted in a division of energy, remarkable in its 
immediate results, but without promise of healthy 
development and continuous growth. 

By the end of the sixteenth century the reaction 
came. The wars of the League had been a cruel de- 
ception to the high-strung hopes of a new era of peace 
and good-will, the sphere of human knowledge had 
been widened beyond the hope of individual grasp, 
and the limitation of the mind was brought home to 
it with crushing weight. The intellectual lassitude 
that resulted found its expression in criticism rather 
than in fresh creation. Save Eegnier, who appears as 
one born out of due time, the first half of the seven- 
teenth century shows no great lyric or epic poet ; and 
when at last La Fontaine appears, he is a very enfant 
terrible to his contemporary critics, who praise his 
defects and bear with his virtues. In prose, too, the 
best work is critical and analytic. The drama, because 
more directly in touch with the people, preserved a 
more independent life, yielding least and latest. But 
Malherbe expressed the state of mind of the cultured 
men of the time ; he is the herald of what is typical 
in the classical school, the " Age of Louis XIV. " His 
poetry was an art ; it could be learned, weighed, meas- 
ured. You could calculate the percentages of imperfect 
or cognate rhymes, of incorrect verses, of words and 
phrases that presumed to stir the mind from a becom- 



46 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

ing balance of calm repose. This age understood this 
poetry ; but when it saw these very qualities trans- 
fused by the fire of Eonsard's genius, who had done 
all that was ever claimed for his pedantic successor, 
that was an individuality that defied mechanical criti- 
cism, and wearied minds already predisposed to make 
great sacrifices for order and propriety in the state, 
and in literature also. This temper of mind, that 
prefers order and rule to originality and individual- 
ism, begins to dominate the literature of France with 
Malherbe ; and it exercised an almost undisputed 
authority for good and ill till the Eomantic revolt 
in the third decade of our century. " The rule of 
rules becomes to resemble one another. " 

So the lyric innovations of the Pleiad were obscured, 
and its pedantry superseded by a studied rhetorical 
impersonality, against which Eegnier fought a losing 
fight, though his satires are among the most vigorous 
that French literature has to show, and contain a 
powerful attack on Malherbe and the upas-tree of 
his overweening criticism. Several of Siguier's short 
poems are delightful in their pathos or graceful wit. 
Malherbe's merit, on the other hand, is almost wholly 
formal. He crystallized the language into its classical 
form. He strove to the best of his ability to prune its 
unfruitful shoots without impoverishing its vital force, 
and in this effort he ranked logical clearness above all 
other qualities. Thus he sacrificed the lyric and 
Italian element in the Pleiad to eloquence. He aimed 
to give to the luxuriant but irregular phraseology and 
prosody of his predecessors artistic restraints that could 
not fail to further the development of literary form, 
though Malherbe 's worth appears rather in the work of 
his successors than in his own. Indeed, he wrote 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 47 

very little, for the most part occasional verses addressed 
to the court or aristocracy ; but it is hard to read that 
little without weariness at a mediocrity whose great 
fault is that it has not virility enough to err. Per- 
sonally his biographer and pupil, Bacan, shows him as 
a man of petty and presumptuous arrogance, — a quality 
illustrated by his attitude toward Eonsard, whom he 
first plundered of all that he was capable of valuing 
and then mocked with systematic depreciation. The 
spark that helps some of his verses, for instance the 
" Ode of Consolation, " to an asthmatic life is Eonsard 's ; 
the spirit that insists on rhyming for eye as well as 
ear, f hat forbids the linking of words etymologically 
connected or of proper nouns, that seeks curiously, as 
his biographer tells us, " for rare and sterile rhymes, " — 
that spirit is all his own. And yet perhaps this 
very exaggeration of correctness was a necessary protest 
against the careless negligence of genius, and an essen- 
tial prelude to the more studied harmonies and the 
more artistic liberties of the great poets of the last 
century. Without Malherbe we can conceive perhaps 
of Verlaine, but hardly of Lamartine, of Hugo, or of 
Leconte de Lisle. 

Malherbe 's " Art of Poetry, " like that of the " Meis- 
tersinger " in Germany, was something that could be 
taught on a tally -board; and he had worthy disciples, 
artisans in verse such as Maynard, Eacan, with some 
true poetic gift and a more genuine appreciation of 
nature, Voiture, a graceful but " idle singer of an 
empty day, " the anacreontic Saint-Amant, and others 
whose names are shadows. All of these suffered from 
the artificial conceits that the literary lights of the 
Hotel Eambouillet had brought into fashion. But 
the muse that had been thus " brought back to the 



48 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

rules of duty " was presently to be drilled in them by 
a master of deportment more strict than Malherbe had 
ever been. This man who did most to clip the wings 
of the .French Pegasus was Boileau (1636-1711), a 
pedantic Parisian bourgeois, whose critical obiter dicta 
were long regarded as sacred by French critics and 
French schoolmasters. He was fairly acquainted 
with Latin, and his lack of familiarity with the Greek 
poets may be excused by his obvious inability to appre- 
ciate them ; though in the curious controversy between 
the Ancients and Moderns that marked the close of the 
century in France, and found its echo in the pamphlet 
warfare of Bentley and Temple in England, he loudly 
proclaimed the superiority of the Ancients, and ranged 
himself with the Cartesians in opposition to the 
renaissance spirit. The order and self-restraint of 
the classical aesthetics attracted his scientific mind; 
but he never thoroughly grasped the fundamental 
principles of Greek literary art, and his indifference to 
the contemporary literatures of other countries was par- 
alleled only by his ignorance of the earlier writers of 
his own. He did not conceive his critical canons as 
relative to his time and his environment, but as abso- 
lute for all times and all races, and hence he felt that 
he could neglect the past without loss. Still, if 
Boileau lacked a pure and catholic taste, he had much 
honest and loyal though stubborn and rough good 
sense, which he savored with a little epicurean real- 
ism that made his destructive criticism of his precieux 
contemporaries usually just, though it may have been 
unnecessary. Especially should one hold in grateful 
remembrance the quietus given to the ghost of chival- 
rous romance by his " Dialogue sur les h^ros, " though 
there had not been much real life in that monstrosity 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 49 

since the " Eoman comique " of Scarron. He did in- 
deed guide the next generation to a true if narrow 
naturalism ; and though he formulated rather than 
inspired the dramatic art of Molifere and Bacine, he 
did much to direct their talent as well as that of La 
Fontaine to its most fruitful channels. He was the 
dogmatist of the school of 1660 ; and it was his sound 
common-sense, more perhaps than any other one thing, 
that spread and prolonged its influence. 

The positive effect of Boileau's criticism was, how- 
ever, deadening and narrowing. 1 His rationalistic 
and Cartesian adaptation of Horace's " Ars poetica " 
proclaimed with sufficient talent to persuade a degen- 
erating taste that poetry was artificiality raised to a 
science. He imposed upon many men of no genius, 
and perhaps stifled the genius of some ; his only great 
scholar who gained by the teaching was Eacine. For 
his talent could profit by instructions that would have 
trammelled Corneille and amused Moli&re. 

A few lines from Boileau's " Art of Poetry " will 
serve to suggest his spirit. In tragedy it is essential, 
he says, — 

Qu'en un lieu, qu'en un jour, un seul fait accompli 
Tienne jusqu'a la fin le theatre rempli. 

And then it must not have a Christian basis, for 

De la foi (Tun chretien les mysteres terribles 
D'ornements egayes ne sont pas susceptibles. 

Even in comedy we must have no naturalistic studies. 
This is to his mind the great error of Molifere, who 

1 Boileau's descriptive verses suggest to Lanson (p. 483) an M un- 
sentimental Coppee." Sainte-Beuve finds in his poems courage and 
audacity, but never truth. Cp. "Nineteenth Century/' December, 1881. 

4 



50 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

Peut-etre de son art eut remporte le prix 

Si, nioins ami du peuple, en ses doctes peintures 

II n'eut pas fait souvent grimacer ses figures. 

Kather than study the vulgar foibles of mankind, we 
should " imitons de Marot l'^ldgant badinage," for ele- 
gance of language is a prime and universal necessity : 

Sans la langue, en im mot, Tauteur le plus divin 
Est toujours, quoiqu'il fasse, un mechant ecrivain. 

And if you would be a good writer of alexandrines, 
your main care should be 

Que toujours dans vos vers le sens coupant les mots 
Suspende l'kemistiche, en marque le repos. 

Now, Boileau 's postulate was sound enough. 
" Beauty is truth, and truth is nature. " Hence let 
nature be the sole study. " Tout doit tendre au bon 
sens, " — everything must tend to sober common-sense ; 
there should be no vagaries of genius. And in all 
this Boileau was perfectly sincere ; only to him 
" nature " was a very narrow segment of the sphere 
seen through glasses that both colored and distorted 
it. His " nature " is only what is typical, universal ; 
and his method of attaining it is imitation of classical 
models and a careful distinction of the classical genres. 
He applied to form the same principles as to substance. 
Here, too, he would have no freaks, and novelty was 
condemned without a hearing. Technique to Boileau 
is second, and hardly second, to inspiration ; and since 
formal technique tends to stifle inspiration, Boileau's 
teaching was progressively deadening to the succeeding 
generations. 

As different from Boileau as a winding woodland 
stream from a well-kept canal is La Fontaine, a true 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 51 

and naturalistic poet, who calmly ignored the tradi- 
tional rules of his art and won the hearts of critics 
who shook their heads. It was impossible to deny 
his wit and winning grace ; and the unambitious fable 
or tale in which he clothed them seemed to harbor 
a less dangerous license than more serious efforts 
would have done. The court and its critics could 
pardon the frailty of a sylvan muse, when they would 
have been pitiless to an error of Melpomene. So La 
Fontaine preserved and handed down the tradition of 
metrical liberty to the Eomantic poets of 1830. 

La Fontaine's first work of importance, the first 
book of his " Contes," dates from 1664 and his forty- 
third year. Already he had become socially popular, 
and had been intimately associated with Boileau, 
Moliere, and Eacine. More "Contes" (1666) were 
followed by " Fables " (1668) ; and the year 1671 shows 
his versatile genius as editor of a volume of mystically 
religious verse, as author of "Contes," whose humor 
was very unrestrained, and of " Fables, " whose equal 
humor was quite without this gallic spice. These 
seven years were the best fruitage of his long, easy, 
and irresponsible life. For La Fontaine seems never 
to have quite outlived the carelessness of childhood, — 
a trait that impressed all his friends, and is reflected 
in the words with w T hich Louis licensed his election to 
the Academy (1683) : " II a promis d'etre sage. " After 
this he wrote only " Fables. " His friends took care 
of him when his wife declined the burden. He died, 
after a tardy conversion to the religiosity that the 
aged Louis had made popular, in 1695. Endless anec- 
dotes tell of his guileless simplicity and absent- 
mindedness. His intimates called him the " good 
fellow. " Of them all Molifere alone, perhaps, justly 



52 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

appreciated his literary importance. " Our wits labor 
in vain; they will not outlive the bonhomme," he 
said when once he overheard Boileau and Eacine 
chaffing their common friend. And he was right, for 
he has always been more read than either of them ; and 
as time goes on, it is felt that he was of greater service 
than they, — a consummation doubtless very far from 
the dreams of either the critic or the tragedian. 

The " Fables " and the " Contes " have exercised a 
deep and permanent influence both on French litera- 
ture and on our own. La Fontaine's miscellaneous 
work, 1 though often good, is less individual and little 
read. His " Contes " are essentially fabliaux devel- 
oped by a studied prosody and delicate feeling for 
style, coupled with a skill in narration that is the 
height of art in its apparent ease and naturalness. 
He is the true continuator of De la Salle, of Des 
Periers, and of Marguerite. Now, neither he, nor 
they, nor their Italian fellows, recognized what we 
to-day hold to be fundamental conventions of decency. 
Their stories deal very largely with subjects not now 
admitted to polite literary circles, but then regarded as 
not unbecoming even by such irreproachable ladies as 
Madame de Sdvignd The same thing is observable 
in English literature. If these " Contes " are to be 
read at all, it must be in the simple, naive spirit in 
which they were written. There is no sniggering about 
them, no conscious pandering to vice. They represent 
a phase in the development of European morals, 
which we may describe as the persistence of the hedon- 

1 Hemon, CEuvres diverses de la Fontaine, gives the best of these, 
notably the "Voyage en Limousin" and the prose version of "Psyche/* 
that for its charming grace of style may rank with the best prose of 
Fenelon and Madame de SeVigne. 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 53 

Istic revolt of the renaissance between the old faith and 
the new Cartesian philosophy. 1 It is no longer the 
lusty joy of life that pulsed in Boccaccio and in Babe- 
lais, with their eager love of sense and beauty after 
centuries of ascetic repression, nor yet the " subtle 
mixture of passion and sensuality, of poetry and appe- 
tite, " that we find in Marguerite and Eonsard. The 
renaissance was no longer a revolutionary force, and 
what was a passionate cult to Boccaccio becomes in La 
Fontaine the elfish naturalism of a satyr child. Bead 
in the spirit of the writer, the " Contes " are charming ; 
but it may be admitted that it is difficult for those who 
have inherited the traditions of Victorian " propriety " 
to read the Contes without offense at the sensual ele- 
ment in their gayety. Yet we have no right to judge 
the work of one century by the moral standards of 
another. We may fix the distinction. We need not 
draw a comparison. 

There is no need of any such reserve, however, when 
we turn to the " Fables. " They were, are, and always 
will be, wholly delightful in the graceful liveliness of 
their narration, in the restrained naturalism of their 
art and the homely worldly wisdom of their unobtru- 
sive moral. One knows not whether to admire most 
the varied mastery of the form, the accurate analysis 
and observation of human nature, or the boldness with 
which, in the later books, he uses the fable as a cover 
for political teaching that is sometimes startlingly 
radical. As Saintsbury has gracefully said : " The 
child rejoices in the freshness and vividness of the 
story, the eager student of literature in the consum- 
mate art with which it is told, the experienced man 
of the world in the subtle reflections on character and 

1 Cp. Lanson, p. 552. 



54 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

life which it conveys. " Thus, in a double sense, these 
" Fables " are not of one age, but for all ages, and for 
all men, except it be poets of the type of Lamartine, 
who could discern only " limping, disjointed, unequal 
verses, without symmetry either in the ear or on the 
page," in stanzas where others find a most original and 
studied harmony. 1 

The " Fables " of La Fontaine are familiar to every 
French school-boy, acquaintance with his work is pre- 
sumed in all cultivated society, turns of expression and 
phrases taken from them fall as naturally from the 
lips and pens of educated Frenchmen as biblical 
phrases did, and perhaps still do, from New England 
Puritans. The universal acquaintance with his work 
influenced and aided the emancipation of poetry by the 
school of 1830, especially among those who still did 
homage to Boileau with their lips though their hearts 
were elsewhere. For La Fontaine is very great, per- 
haps supreme ; but it is in a kind of poetry that is not 
great. Therefore, though he is the best fabulist and 
best story-teller that is known to French literature, 
he is not a great poet. But he is the one poet of his 
century whose poetry is still generally read and en- 
joyed, while Boileau's verses are studied rather as 
rhetorical models and as essays in criticism. 

It was natural that the prose of the early part of the 
seventeenth century should suffer less from artificiality 
than lyric poetry, the most sensitive of all literary 
forms ; but it too felt the reaction, and there is 
nothing to recall the verve of Babelais, the force of 
Montaigne, or the grace of Marguerite, in the work 

1 Rousseau aud his age cared too much for their " state of nature" 
to care for La Fontaiue, but Voltaire toward the close of his life re- 
gretted the strictures of his youth. See his letter to Chamfort. 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 55 

of the first third of the century. In fiction the changed 
spirit shows itself in the influence of the Italian Pas- 
torals, and in imitations of those Spanish followers of 
Gongora who were the chief instigators throughout 
Europe of the style known to English students as 
Euphuism. This studied affectation showed itself in 
France, as elsewhere, chiefly in chivalrous romances. 
The immediate model was the Spanish " Amadis, " that 
had been translated late in the sixteenth century. 
Hence these novels will usually be named, at least by 
readers of Don Quixote, with a certain mocking shrug. 
The best of them is D'lTrf^'s " Astrde, " whose chilly 
heroine tells of the combat in her soul between love 
and reason, of which the linked sweetness is prolonged 
through some five thousand pages, during which her 
love-sick Celadon learns to know himself sufficiently 
to discern that a pastoral lover " is no longer man, for 
he has cast off all wit and judgment. " It is but just 
to say that Celadon's foil, the inconstant shepherd 
Hylas, is not without humor, and has touches of quite 
modern Uague. " Astrde * was a pastoral ; the " Grand 
Cyrus" and " Cldlie " of the Scud^rys pictured modern 
society under the thin disguise of heroic romance. 
Yet it is only with amused curiosity that one notes 
to -clay the ponderous apparatus of their elaborate 
allegory, or glances at the explanatory map of " Ten- 
dsrland, " with its rivers of Esteem, Gratitude, and 
Inclination, its villages of Attention, Verses, and 
Epistles, its lake of Indifference, and its seas of 
Enmity and Danger. 

In their day D'Urfe and the Scuddrys, with other 
similar though less talented novelists, 1 were immensely 
popular, and that among the most cultured and aris- 
1 E. g., La Calprenede, Camus, and Gomberville. 



56 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

tocratic class. Indeed, the picture of society that 
" Astrde " painted was the inspiring cause of the first 
Parisian salon, which met at the Hotel Kambouillet 
and took its name from its hostess. The raison d'etre 
of this coterie, like that of Cdladon and his mistress, 
was the attrition of witty conversation in an exclusive 
society. But narrow as this circle was, both in its 
principles and its numbers, it exercised a very impor- 
tant influence on the whole classical period, for by its 
unnatural straining after rare and curious conceits, it 
interrupted the development of a simple and direct 
style. Thus it fostered an artificiality that, in spite 
of Molifere's satire, was not wholly banished from 
French literature till the rise of the Eomantic School. 
But so far as the pastoral or heroic romance was con- 
cerned, if the disease was acute the remedy was speedy. 
The analogy of other literatures would lead us to expect 
a reaction from over-strained sentiment to coarse natu- 
ralism. Of this Sorel' s " Francion " had given a 
warning sign as early as 1622, and the old romances 
received their coup de grace in Scarron's " Eoman 
comique " (1651), that drew its inspiration from 
Babelais and the Spanish novela piearesca, and found 
its more artistic sequel in Le Sage's " Gil Bias. " 1 A 
more independent social study that shows the influence 
of the realistic school of 1660 is Fureti&re's " Eoman 
bourgeois " (1666), a collection of " human documents " 
for middle-class Parisian life. Meantime the same 
careful observation was being directed to the study of 
individual character by Madame de Lafayette, who, in 
" Mile, de Montpensier, " had discovered that marriage 

1 The corresponding English movement, begun by Defoe and con- 
tinned by Smollett, owes much to both Spanish and French picaroon 
romancers. 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 57 

was as appropriate as courtship for artistic treatment, 
and furnished in her exquisite " Princesse de Clfeves " 
(1678) the starting-point of the psychological novel as 
distinct from romance. But the critics of the time 
were far from appreciating the real importance of this 
very popular book. Indeed, just as realism was thus 
announcing its advent in fiction, the court coterie, 
attracted by La Fontaine's " Cupid and Psyche," were 
seized with a fancy for writing prose fables, fairy tales, 
of which a vast number were born to an ephemeral life 
during the closing decades of the century. The best 
in this shadowy kind is Perrault, the French god- 
father of "Puss-in -Boots," of " Eed Eiding-Hood, " 
" The Sleeping Beauty, " and " Tom Thumb. " In the 
next century this style was continued by Hamilton and 
many others, and was diverted later by Voltaire to 
political and philosophical purposes, and to ethical 
ones by Marmontel ; while the " Princesse de Clfeves " 
has no direct literary progeny. 

Outside the sphere of fiction the prose of the century 
opens with Jean de Balzac, a rhetorical and pains- 
taking continuator of Montaigne, who did much to 
smooth the way for the great prose writers and orators 
that followed. Aided by the prestige of the Hotel 
Eambouillet, and by the foundation of the French 
Academy (1634), of which he was a leading member, 
he set deliberately to work to be to French prose the 
benefactor that he conceived Malherbe to have been 
to its poetry ; but his work had value only as a stylistic 
model. Not so the limpid directness of Descartes and 
the supple strength of Pascal, the philosophers who 
illustrate this period. The former's " Discourse on 
Method " is the starting-point in France of a developed, 
scientific, argumentative style ; while his * Treatise on 



58 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

the Passions " is the systematic statement of the psy- 
chological basis of Corneille's tragedies, whose virile 
energy of will contrasts with the more feminine senti- 
ment of Eacine and the School of 1660. 2 It was from 
Descartes as much as from Balzac that Pascal and La 
Eochefoucauld learned their marvellous mastery over 
language. Pascal's " Pens^es, " though incomplete, 
are as clear as they are keen, as logical as they are 
charming. They combine the mathematical mind with 
the poet's vision, while his " Provincial Letters " 
against the casuistry of the Jesuits remain to this day 
an unmatched masterpiece of caustic irony and crush- 
ing contempt, clothed in a style of which one knows 
not whether most to admire the graceful energy or the 
brilliant wit. Pascal is the leader of the ascetic reac- 
tion against the naturalism of the sixteenth century 
and the facile ethics of Jesuit casuists ; he is also the 
first of French prose writers who seems thoroughly at 
home with his rhetorical tools. There has been gradual 
adaptation to new needs, but French prose has made 
no great advance, indeed has needed to make none, 
from his day to ours. 

After these had gone before, progress became easy in 
other lines. So De Eetz's " Conspiracy of Fiesco " 
marks a gain in picturesque historical description; 
while his lively, keen, and piquant " Memoirs " show 
an unscrupulous will and a pen sharpened by use. 
The worldly wisdom of his maxims yields only to the 
cruel temper of La Eochefoucauld's cynical satire. 
That the underlying pessimism of these men is fairly 
representative of a general state of mind, is clear from 
the reception accorded to their work. La Eochefou- 
cauld, especially, marks an ethical change in the pop- 

1 Cp. Lanson, p. 393. 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTUKY. 59 

ular view of life that is an essential prelude to the 
iconoclastic optimism of the next century. He claims 
literary notice, however, not only as a representative, 
but as an individual. Condemned by the failure of 
the Fronde to retirement, he amused himself and a 
witty circle of friends, with the luxury of an aristo- 
cratic seigneur, and with a Memoirs " and " Maxims," 
in which he pitilessly unfolds the seamy side of life. 
Personally a good man, affectionate and beloved, he 
exhibits here the consistent and scornful pessimist; 
but he is more an aristocrat than a philosopher. He 
cares little for system or completeness of analysis. 
He takes up, one by one, such ideas as come to him, 
and uses them, with prudent reserves, to illustrate his 
theory, which is, briefly, that every virtue is a product 
of vices, while these are resolvable into selfishness, 
" in which all virtues are lost like rivers in the sea. " 
This conclusion does not excite his anger, but rather 
amuses his curiosity, and that is much the effect it 
seems to have had on contemporary readers. Its 
effect on literary form was much greater. The nature 
of both influences will appear better from a few cita- 
tions than from any brief analysis : — 

Vice enters into the composition of virtues just as 
poisons do into medicines. Prudence collects and tem- 
pers them, and uses them against the ills of life. 

People think sometimes that we hate flattery, but we 
hate only the way they flatter. 

It is not always by valor that men are valiant, nor by 
virtue that women are chaste. 

Men would not live long in society if they were not one 
another's dupes. . . . The world is made up of masks. 

Old men give good precepts to console themselves for 
being no longer able to give bad examples. 



60 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

Our passions are the only orators that always convince. 

If we resist our passions, it is rather by their weakness 
than by our strength. 

We all have strength enough to bear the ills of others. 

If we had no pride, we should not complain that others 
had it. 

We easily forget our faults when no one else knows 
them. . . . We try to be proud of the faults that we do 
not wish to forget. 

We promise according to our hopes ; we keep according 
to our fears. 

We pardon those who bore us, but we cannot forgive 
those whom we bore. 

The spirit that animates these " Maxims " can be 
traced in Voltaire, in Stendhal, and most clearly in 
the French cynic, Chamfort, and his greater succes- 
sor, the German Schopenhauer. But their value as 
literature was much greater and wider ; for it should 
be clear, even from what has been cited, that in these 
" distilled thoughts " French prose style has attained a 
pregnant terseness comparable only to the best verses 
of Corneille. As Voltaire said, the Maxims " accus- 
tomed men to think and to express their thoughts 
with a lively, precise, delicate turn;" and this epi- 
grammatic quality has ever since been a characteristic 
of the best writers of France. 

But with all this progress in various directions 
French prose still lacked its La Fontaine, its easy, 
graceful raconteur. This last step was taken in the 
letters of Madame de S^vigne (1626-1696), most 
charming of all correspondents. There are some three 
thousand of her letters, addressed for the most part 
to her rather unsympathetic daughter Madame de 
Grignon, and to her gay cousin, Bussy-Babutin, author 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 61 

of the amusing but scandalous " Histoire amoureuse des 
Gaules. " In her younger days she had been an assid- 
uous frequenter of the Hotel Kambouillet, but she was 
shrewd enough not to fall into the vagaries that made 
its blue-stockings the just butt of Molifere. Married 
in 1644, she was left a widow in 1651 with a son and 
a daughter, and after three years of retirement, re- 
turned to Paris in 1654, to be a literary leader there 
for nearly forty years. It is not, however, till after 
the marriage of her daughter, in 1669, that the corre- 
spondence begins to flow freely with its inexhaustible 
stream of court news and town talk, varied with bril- 
liant reportorial sketches of the baths of Vichy. The 
succession of letters is interrupted only by rare visits 
to her daughter, and continues till her death. With 
the most charming naturalness she " lets her pen trot, 
bridle on the neck, " " diverting herself as much in a 
chat with her as she labors with other correspondents. " 
To her daughter she gives, as she says, " the top of all 
the baskets, the flowers of her wit, head, eyes, pen, 
style ; and the rest get on as they can. " As natural 
as La Fontaine, she is a model correspondent, wholly 
free from the artificiality of Balzac, or even from that 
balanced poise that in another field added to the glory 
of Pascal, and was the chief factor in that of Bossuet. 
For the ultimate result of the criticism of Balzac 
and of the Academy, of Vaugelas, and the Hotel Eam- 
bouillet, is not seen in La Eochefoucauld, nor in 
S£vign£, but in the elaborate though superficial periods 
of La Bruyfere's " Caractkres, " who at his best suggests 
Voltaire, and in the polished orations of the court 
preachers of Louis XIV., whose ambitious energies 
were roused by the attitude of the king toward Galli- 
can liberties, and by attacks of able Protestants and 
Jansenists. Chief among them, and perhaps the 



62 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

greatest pulpit orator of modern times, was Bossuet 
(1627-1704), whose " Oraisons funfebres " and histori- 
cal pamphlets are masterpieces of clear directness and 
plastic art drawn from a literary study of the Bible ; 
while the suppler Fdnelon (1651-1715), once tutor to the 
Dauphin, betrays in his style a deeper classical study. 
His " T^maque " was long a model of style for almost 
all foreign students of French, and had an acceptance 
at home second only to that of La Fontaine's " Fables. " 
It is refreshing to find that Fdnelon's theory was even 
better than his practice ; for he felt and regretted the 
restraints to which he yielded, and was keen enough 
to prophesy in his " Letter to the Academy " that the 
only result of such trammels to literature as the pur- 
ists were striving to impose must be poverty ; and dry 
rot, such as the close of the century was to see. 1 

Other great preachers of the time, whose names are 
not unknown even outside France, were Massillon, 
Bourdaloue, and Fiddlier; while allied to them in 
style and mode of thought is Malebranche, whose 
chief charm, if not his chief merit, is a language 
whose picturesque clearness masks the misty concep- 
tions that it irradiates. He marks the highest devel- 
opment of the classical style, and contrasts in this, as 
in his philosophy, with his contemporary Bayle, whose 
" Dictionnaire " (1697) was to the " Philosophers " of 
the following century at once a storehouse of most 
varied learning and the ironical herald of their skep- 
tical infidelity. 2 

It was in prose that the language of 1600 had most 
needed order and reform, and it is in prose that the 

1 Lanson's keen analysis of Fe'nelon's character discovers in him an 
egoistical reactionary, more sentimental than logical, who had much in 
common with Rousseau, for whom he contributed to prepare the way. 

2 Cp. Brunetiere, Etudes critiques, iii. 182 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 63 

great permanent advance was gained during this cen- 
tury. Yet the writers who have left the deepest im- 
press on the language are not the sententious builders 
of polished periods, but those who with true artistic 
sense aimed only to make prose a clear and limpid 
vehicle of thought. A great gulf separates Sevign£ 
from Montaigne ; but the advance was not due to the 
rhetoricians, to Balzac and Vaugelas, nor even to the 
orators, but to the thinkers and raconteurs, who each 
in his kind had something to say, and cared less for 
meticulous correctness than for clearness and point. 

No form of literature in 1600 promised less than 
the drama. At the end of the century it had become 
what it has remained, the most important form of 
French literary expression. It is, therefore, of pecu- 
liar interest to see whether this great development was 
due to the classical spirit as represented by Boileau and 
the critical purists, or whether their influence was not 
rather a check than a stimulus. A student of com- 
parative literature, remembering that this is the age 
of Shakspere and Lope, would look for dramatic 
activity in France also ; and in the first thirty years of 
the century, while the lyric muse was learning her 
mincing steps, and prose was beginning to substitute 
the rapier for the quarter-staff, the number of play- 
wrights bears witness to the growing popularity of the 
drama, due in great degree to the efforts of Hardy 
(1560-1631), who brought the stage more in touch 
with the audience than had been possible to the 
classical lucubrations of the school of Jodelle. 

Hardy's reforms were quite independent of criticism, 
and dictated by the necessities of the situation. Him- 
self attached to a dramatic company and writing plays 
to be acted rather than read, he cared less for scholarly 
than for popular applause, and declined with a light 



64 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

heart the heavy burden of the " unities. " Moreover, 
being compelled to various and speedy production, he 
was led to look for subjects in history and fiction, old 
and new. With some aid from the Italian, but prob- 
ably none from the Spanish stage, he dramatized what- 
ever seemed likely to suit the taste of his plebeian 
audiences ; and so he introduced to the French theatre 
an element of fresh life and a partial naturalism that 
acted like a tonic, and induced other writers of more 
literary culture than he to offer their pieces to his 
company. One cannot but regret that he ignored or 
feared the greater freedom of the English stage, whose 
traditions would have been of priceless service to Cor- 
neille and Moli&re. But Hardy was no imitator. His 
virtues were due to his dependence on the healthy 
sense of the theatre-going masses ; and to this, too, may 
be attributed his chief vice, bombast and rhodomontade 
to tickle the ears of the groundlings, — a weakness from 
which Shakspere is not wholly free. 

Hardy died in 1631, a year memorable in the annals 
of the French stage, for it saw the proclamation 1 of the 
so-called classical unities of time, place, and action. 
After much battling and varying fortunes, these found 
favor with Eichelieu in 1635, and by 1640 had estab- 
lished their fateful and exclusive sway in French trag- 
edy. This minimizing of dramatic conventions suited 
the rationalistic and unimaginative spirit of the pre- 
cieux of the Hotel Eambouillet, who now began to 
take an active interest in the drama, and saw in the 
" unities " their narrow ideal of nature, good-sense, and 
rationality. But rules that were proposed in the interest 
of greater realism were destined to lead before the close 
of the century to the most deadening artificiality. 

1 By Mairet in his preface to " Silvan ire." 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 65 

The battle of the " unities " had been preceded by the 
first dramatic work both of Corneille and of Eotrou. 
The latter produced his first play at Hardy's theatre 
while still a genial youth of nineteen (1628), and 
presently joined the dramatic collaborators of Cardinal 
Eichelieu, where Corneille was his associate, his friend, 
and, though only three years his senior, finally his 
master. Botrou's really excellent work followed and 
was obscured by the greater glories of Corneille ; but it 
is worth noting that in his * Saint-Genest " (1646) he 
imitated Corneille's favorite " Polyeucte " (1643), in 
treating on the stage a Christian conversion and mar- 
tyrdom, quite in accord with the origins of the French 
drama, but contradicting more recent traditions and 
arousing the futile anger of the purists. 

Corneille, if not the greatest, is the first in time of 
the galaxy that make the literary glory of the age of 
Louis XIV. , though his best work was done before the 
advent of that monarch. Born in 1606, he was sixteen 
years older than Molifere and preceded Eacine by a 
generation. The Jesuits of his native Eouen educated 
him for the law, but bashfulness increased his distaste 
for pleading, and accident co-operated with genius to 
draw him to dramatic work. His first play, " M^lite, " 
was produced in Eouen in 1629. But neither this nor 
the dramas that followed during the next seven years, 
though far superior to anything that had preceded them 
both in naturalness and vigor, contained more than a 
promise of better things to come ; and this promise 
pointed rather to the Spanish drama of intrigue and 
to the comedy of contemporary society than to the true 
field of his tragic genius. It is hard to realize that 
the author of " Horace " began his career by a play in 
which kissing and pick-a-back are prominent features, 
and single-line repartees, " cat and puss dialogues," as 



66 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

Butler calls them, are bandied about like shuttle- 
cocks. But it may seem stranger still to find that he 
felt called upon to apologize for " his simple and 
familiar style, " saying that he feared the reader would 
take simplicity for ill-breeding. So strong was the 
artificial reaction that Malherbe had heralded, even on 
the popular stage. But Corneille from the first had the 
courage of his convictions. He never sacrificed nature 
to rule, nor his thought to a vowel quantity. And he 
lost nothing by his daring. His earlier plays, enliv- 
ened by studies from life and the happy invention 
of the soubrette, won popular success both at Eouen and 
at Hardy's theatre in Paris. Thus the poet was drawn 
to the capital and the passing sunshine of Kichelieu's 
favor in 1634. This he lost the next year by revising 
too freely a dramatic concept of the great yet petty Cardi- 
nal; but with the public he was a favorite to the last. 

The contact with the wider life of Paris and his lit- 
erary associations there awakened dormant powers. 
" M£d£e " appeared in 1635, and in two years he had 
written the "Cid " (1636), a drama so different from 
the previous attempts that it hardly bears a trace of 
the same hand. This work attracted universal in- 
terest, and placed him at once above all his predeces- 
sors and contemporaries. Eichelieu was jealous; the 
purists of the Academy took umbrage, less at the 
liberties he had taken with his Spanish original than 
at those he had failed to take. Indeed among the 
coterie of the precieux the perversion of taste had 
reached such a point that Scudery, a critic of some 
repute, asserted, and it seems believed, that its subject 
was ill-chosen, its irregularity unpardonable, its action 
clumsy, its verses bad, and its beauties stolen. The 
" Cid " does, indeed, lack the ethical depth and tragic 
force of " Horace " or " Polyeucte ; " yet, as Boileau 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 67 

said, " all Paris has for Eodrigue the eyes of Chinifene, " 
and the drama is the most popular oh the stage of all 
his plays. 

Corneille could not be as independent of cultured 
opinion as Hardy. The fierce battle that raged round 
the " Cid " caused him to withdraw for three years to 
Rouen. But he had faith in his genius, and with his 
return to Paris in 1639 there begins a period of almost 
unparalleled fecundity. The Roman tragedies, " Hor- 
ace " and " Cinna " (1640), were followed by " Poly- 
eucte, " a story of Christian martyrdom, — a bold 
venture, for when it was read at the Hotel Rambouillet, 
" the Christianity was found extremely displeasing" 
to these delicate souls, who thought heathenism good 
enough for literature, which, as we have seen, was 
also Boileau's conviction. Then came " Pompey " and 
" Rodogune," a tragedy of terror which marks the cul- 
mination of a tendency to exaggeration in passion and 
character that allies Corneille to the Romanticists. 
These, with " Le Menteur, " the first good French com- 
edy, and its " Suite, " were all written within five years, 
which embrace about all of his work that is read and 
prized to-day. There follows a period of arrest (1645- 
1652) with some signs of decline, but with flashes of 
genius as bright as any in his work, and with an occa- 
sional character of extraordinary vigor such as Phocas 
in " H&raclitus. " At length he suspended his dramatic 
work for seven years (1652-1659), and turned his 
talent to a versified translation of the " Imitation of 
Christ," and to critical essays of remarkable frank- 
ness on his own plays and other dramaturgical work. 
Between 1659 and 1674 he wrote eleven more trage- 
dies of unequal mediocrity, though occasional verses 
showed all the fire of his prime. It was on two of 



68 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

these that Boileau composed his famous and ill- 
natured epigram : — 

Apres FAgesilas, Helas, 

Mais apres l'Attila, Hola. 

But Boileau, who thought Bacine " a very clever 
fellow whom I had a hard time to teach to write 
verse/' is recorded as of the opinion that the three 
great writers of his day were " Corneille, Molidre, 
and — myself. " The opposition Corneille met from 
those who followed the school of 1660 was not due to 
his failing talent, but to the new conception of dra- 
matic art introduced by Boileau and Bacine. Even in 
old age he never lost popularity ; but he lived in nar- 
row circumstances, if not in poverty. " I am satiated 
with glory and hungry for money, " he said in these 
last years, with a grimness that seems to characterize 
his social relations. He would never curry favor, 
and Bacine tells us he suffered in consequence. He 
had admirers, but not patrons, and he died in compar- 
ative neglect in 1684. Indeed the development of 
taste was leading away from him, and in the next cen- 
tury his fame suffered a partial eclipse. His own time 
and ours were more fitted to comprehend and appreci- 
ate him than the intervening period of iconoclasm and 
perverted criticism. 

The first impression made on an attentive reader, 
even of Corneille's best work, is his unevenness. No 
poet rises to grander heights than he. If we judge 
him by his best, he will rank with the greatest ; but 
many a lesser talent is more sustained, and may attain 
a higher average. Molifere saw this : " My friend 
Corneille, " he said, " has a familiar spirit, who in- 
spires him with the finest verses in the world ; but 
sometimes the spirit deserts him, and then it fares 
ill with him. " Therefore Corneille lends himself 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTUKY. 69 

admirably to citation. Many of his lines cling to the 
memory, and any alexandrine with a rush of sound 
and startling pregnancy of suggestion seems a " Cor- 
neillian " verse. The latter point may be illustrated ; 
one must be a Frenchman to feel the former. 

" I am master of myself as well as of the world, " 
affirms the Emperor Augustus in " Cinna. " " Eome 
is no longer in Eome. It is all where I am, " says Ser- 
torius to Pompey. The assassinated Attila, strangled 
in his blood, " speaks but in stifled gasps what he 
imagines he speaks. " What concentrated force in the 
reply of the father of Horace : " What would you have 
him do against three ? " " That he should die. " Or 
in Medea's: "What resource have you in so utter 
a disaster ? " " Myself ! Myself, I say, and that is 
enough. " * Follow not my steps, " says Polyeucte, " or 
leave your errors. " Finally, since these citations 
might be extended almost indefinitely, consider the 
closing lines of Cleopatra's curse in " Bodogune" : — 

To wish you all misfortune together, 

May a son be born of you who shall resemble me ; 

and Camille's upon Eome : — 

May 1 with my own eyes see this thunderbolt fall on her, 

See her houses in ashes and thy laurels in dust, 

See the last Roman at his last sigh, 

Myself alone be cause of it, and die of the joy. 1 

1 Je suis maitre cle moi comme de l'univers (Cinna, v. 3). Eome n'est 
plus dans Rome. Elle est toute oil je suis (Sertor. iii. 1). Ce n'est plus 
qu'en sanglots qu'il dit ce qu'il croit dire (Attila, v. 2). Que vouliez-vous 
qu'il se fit contre trois? — Qu'il mourut ! (Hor. iii. 6). Dans un si grand 
revers que vous reste-t-il? — Moi ! Moi, dis-je, et c'est assez (Medee, i. 
2). Ne suivez point mes pas ou quittez vos erreurs (Poly. v. 3). 
Et, pour vous souhaitez tous lcs malheurs ensemble, 
Puisse naitre de vous un fils qui me ressemble (Rodog. v. 4). 
Puisse-je de mes yeux y voir tomber ce foudre, 
Voir ses masons en cendre, et tes lauriers en poudre, 
Voir le dernier Romain a son dernier soupir, 
Moi seule, en etre cause, et mourir de plaisir (Hor. iv. 5). 



70 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

It is lines like these, and they are many, that jus- 
tify Faguet in calling Corneille' s language " the most 
masculine, energetic, at once sober and full, that was 
ever spoken in France, " and his verses " the most 
beautiful that ever fell from a French pen. " It is 
such lines that induce Saintsbury, with perhaps un- 
guarded enthusiasm, to call him " the greatest writer 
of France, the only one who, up to our own time, can 
take rank with the Dantes and Shaksperes of other 
countries. wl It is of them that Voltaire says : " They 
earned Corneille the name Great to distinguish him, 
not from his brother Thomas, but from the rest of 
mankind. " 

It was said of Corneille' s tragedies that they 
aroused admiration rather than tragic fear. He does 
not seek to interest us in the fate of his characters, but 
rather in the indomitable will with which they bear 
it, and in their haughty disdain for it. His is a 
drama of situations, not of characters. He delights 
in extraordinary situations and subjects, and belongs, 
as Brunetifere happily puts it, to " the School of the 
Emphatics. " 2 So it is natural that the " linked 
sweetness " of amorous talk that takes so large a place 
in Eacine seems to him rather contemptible. There 
is no philandering or fine-spun sentiment even in the 
loves of Chimkne and Rodrigue, and in " Sertorius " 
Aristie cuts short her lover with the lines : — 

Let us leave, sir, let us leave for petty souls, 
This grovelling barter of sighs and loves. 

But tragedy, with the limitations of Corneille 's 
method, forbids the resource of a minor plot, and 
involves much talk with little action. So his disdain 

1 Encyc. Brit. vi. 419. 2 Etudes critiques, i. 310. 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTUKY. 71 

of the endless subject of talk leaves him often with 
scenes and sometimes acts where interest hopelessly 
flags. Even his noblest work is not without monotony. 
It is always a like grandeur of soul that he represents, 
a like admiration that he excites. One who reads 
many plays of Corneille consecutively finds his appre- 
ciation dulled, and the public who witnessed them 
consecutively might have come to the same feeling. 
Then, too, he has not quite freed the drama from the 
lyric and epic elements that lay in its origin, but were 
foreign to its nature. Still there is a permanent qual- 
ity in his work, as in Shakspere's, — a touch of nature 
that Eacine, at his best, lacks. The superb declama- 
tions of Camille, of Auguste, or of Pompey's widow 
Corndlie, to name no others, will thrill audiences every- 
where, as long as the antinomies of love and patriot- 
ism, honor and duty, perplex men's souls. But oratory 
is far from being the only use of language ; and by 
giving to French when in a very plastic state a sen- 
tentious imprint, Corneille exercised an influence on 
the future of his mother tongue very great, but not 
altogether helpful to its healthy growth and further 
development. 

The rival of Corneille 's later years was Eacine, whom 
Boileau reckoned as his pupil, so that we may regard 
him as representative of the regular academic drama. 
He had a more stable temperament, his work was more 
even in character and polished in execution, and by 
close adherence to rule he long and successfully 
masked the weaker side of his genius. Such formal 
correctness suited the age of Louis, as it did that of 
Anne. But in less skilful hands than his, it sank 
quickly to a mannerism as dreary as it was con- 
temptible. It is indirectly due to him that tragedy, 



72 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

except for Voltaire, hardly lifts its head from the 
waters of oblivion between his death and the rise of 
the Eomantic School. 

Eacine began his education at Port-Eoyal, and 
owed to that school the development of literary 
tastes, and a love for Greek, which furnished the basis 
of his tragic psychology, while that of Corneille had 
a more Eoman sturdiness. He completed his studies 
at Paris, and at twenty was already author of poems 
that earned him the rewards of the court and the con- 
demnation of critics. But he had soon the good for- 
tune to meet La Fontaine and Molifere, and was 
persuaded to try tragedy. His first drama, " The 
Natural Enemies," a study from iEschylus' "Seven 
against Thebes, " is in style a feeble imitation of Cor- 
neille. His next work, " Alexandre " (1665), w r as also 
produced under the influence of Molikre, and marked 
growing power ; but Eacine broke with him that year, 
and his later pieces were acted in the rival theatre of 
the Hotel de Bourgogne. He now became the pupil 
of Boileau, who was inclined to attribute to himself 
the success of his diligent scholar, — not without some 
justice, for Eacine' s style was of the kind that is 
formed by criticism and profits by careful elaboration. 
This was illustrated by " Andromaque " (1667), a play 
that " made almost as much talk as the ' Cid, ' " accord- 
ing to the testimony of Perrault, rousing the admira- 
tion of the friends and the scorn of the enemies of 
Boileau. These latter the dramatist, with the critic's 
co-operation, presently satirized in the Aristophanian 
" Plaideurs, " which has unique merits, and shows the 
author more emancipated in his versification than he 
had been or was to be. 

Corneille, like most writers of the earlier half of the 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 73 

seventeenth century, had subordinated passion to will ; 
Eacine and the School of 1660, in accord with the 
changed temper of the time, subordinated will to pas- 
sion. Hence critics said that Kacine's tragic talent 
was limited to the painting of love. To prove them 
wrong he wrote " Britannicus " (1669), which went 
a long way to prove them right. The piece was not a 
success, and he returned the next year to the old 
theme with " Bdr&iice, " a play that established the 
ascendency of the young poet over the aging Corneille, 
who had attempted the same subject. The plays that 
followed, " Bajazet " (1672) and " Mithridate " (1673), 
show greater suppleness and strength, but it is still 
the same well-worn theme. Yet they mark the height 
of the poet's fame, to which " Iphigenie " (1674) added 
nothing, while " Phkdre " (1677), exaggerating the de- 
fects of his qualities, failed to hold the popular favor. 
He seems to have been threatened with prosecution as 
a corrupter of morals. 1 Scruples that honor him caused 
him to withdraw from the stage, as Corneille had 
done. But his return to it twelve years later in 
" Esther " (1689) and " Athalie " (1691) showed his 
genius at its highest point. Indeed some regard 
" Athalie " as the masterpiece of the entire French 
drama. The causes of this superiority were also the 
causes of its lukewarm public reception. Both plays 
were written for Madame de Maintenon's great school 
for noblewomen at St. Cyr. Hence, by a happy neces- 
sity, love-making was suppressed, and a greater scope 
was given to action, in imitation of sixteenth-century 
models, than Boileau would have counselled or ap- 
proved. This glorious aftermath closed the poet's 
literary career. He died in 1699. 

1 Cp. Brunetiere, Epoques du theatre fran^ais, p. 155, note. 



74 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

It accords with Kacine's conception of dramatic art 
that his scenes are laid in foreign countries, where 
artificial conventions are masked by the strangeness of 
the environment. But there is no attempt at any local 
color. The Greece of Agamemnon was not more for- 
eign to the Versailles of Louis XIV. than it was to the 
Greece of Kacine's " Iphig^nie. " This is least felt in 
" Les Plaideurs, * in " Esther, " and " Athalie, " for here 
the poet is more free ; but it should be noted that in 
all his work the artificiality is in the received notion 
of tragic art rather than in the literary instinct of the 
man. At his most plastic period he had been associ- 
ated with Molikre, and to the last, so far as the con- 
ventions allowed, he tried to do what Molifere had done 
in comedy, — to study and paint with an honest and 
naturalistic psychology human passions and feelings, 
dissociated from any relations of country or age. * He 
aims at a noble simplicity. His ideal, as he states it, 
is " a simple action, with few incidents, such as might 
take place in a single day, which, advancing steadily 
toward its end, is sustained only by the interests and 
passions of the characters," who, as he says elsewhere, 
" must be neither too perfect nor too base, so that 
hearers may recognize themselves in them ; not alto- 
gether culpable, nor wholly innocent, with a virtue 
capable of weakness, that their faults may make 
them less detested than pitied. " His interest, then, 
is in character, not in action ; while Corneille always 
sought the complex crises of history. 

Now, this conception of tragedy is much more akin 
to comedy than any that had preceded it. It is a 

1 He was reproached for this by Fontanelle, who found his charac- 
ters so " natural" that they seemed base. Cp. Brunetiere, ^Etudes 
critiques, i. 319. 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTUEY. 75 

study of human passion and weakness, as in Moliere ; 
but here the pitiless analysis is pushed to the point 
where amused interest yields to dread, and the smile 
to terror. 2 It is this naturalistic portrayal of passions 
common to all men of all time that keeps Kacine's 
hold on the minds of Frenchmen, in spite of the con- 
straints of his form; for of all Europeans they perhaps 
are most willing to condone this trammel to the free 
development of genius. Yet apart from this his 
talent was not of supreme rank. He had not the tragic 
grandeur of Corneille, 2 still less of Shakspere, and 
even in his chosen sphere he had not the keen psycho- 
logical insight of Molifere. 

We are thus brought to the greatest of all writers of 
social comedy, incomparably the greatest French writer 
of his century, and perhaps the greatest name in all 
their literature, Jean Baptiste Poquelin, the first Paris- 
ian among the great writers of France, in his ethics 
successor of Eabelais and Montaigne, and predecessor 
of the rationalists of the next century, of Voltaire and 
Diderot; who, on becoming identified with the stage, 
took, and made immortal, the name of Molifere (1622- 
1673). His parents were well-to-do, he was carefully 
educated by the Jesuits, and his philosophical studies 
with Gassendi, or early associations with such libertins 
as Lhuillier, left many traces in his work and more in 
his life. Then, like Corneille, he studied law. But 

1 This point is ingeniously elaborated by Faguet, 169 sqq. 

2 Brunetiere, Etudes critiques, i. 178, makes this judicious com- 
parison : " The work of Corneille, with all its imperfections of detail, 
is more varied than that of Eacine. It has a surer and quicker effect 
on the stage ; above all, its inspiration is higher, more generous, more 
elevated beyond the common order and ordinary conditions of life. 
But how much it costs to confess it when we come from reading 
Racine ! " 



76 MODEKN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

presently we find him associated with a dramatic com- 
pany, " L'lllustre Theatre," which left Paris in 1646 
to try its fortune in the provinces. For some years of 
wandering and precarious existence, during which 
the company visited almost all the larger cities of 
France, 1 Moliere furnished their repertoire with light 
farces, and at length with more finished comedies in 
the style of the time, — " L'Etourdi" (1653 or 1655) 
and " Le D£pit amoureux " (1656). This wandering 
life was a priceless school to him in the study of 
middle-class men and manners. The future social 
comedian could hardly have used these years to better 
advantage. But the company, or at least Moli&re, was 
now financially prosperous; and in 1658, after more 
than twelve years' absence, he arranged for their return 
to Paris. 

In spite of borrowed Italian elements, these early 
comedies had been enthusiastically received, and indeed 
they were much the best that France could show. But 
both were now cast in the shade by " Les Pr^cieuses ridi- 
cules, " the first dramatic satire on cultured society in 
France. The blue-stockings of the Hotel Eambouillet, 
or perhaps their bourgeois imitators, who, according to 
the " Eoman bourgeois, " abounded in Paris, their 
affected language and manners, were held up to such 
good-humored ridicule that success was immediate and 
universal. Indeed the play has not yet lost its comic 
force, for learning has not wholly supplanted the affec- 
tation of it even among the women of to-day. 

Equally typical of Molifere is his next play, " Sgana- 
relle " (1660), the first of those gay yet profound 

1 We hear of them at Agen, Angouleme, Beziers, Bordeaux, 
Limoges, Lyons, Montpellier, Nantes, Narbonne, Nimes, Rouen, 
Toulouse. 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 77 

farces, which still hold the stage because they raise 
first a laugh and then a thoughtful smile. " Don 
Garcie, " which follows, marks a relapse to the tradi- 
tional comedy ; but in " L'Ecole des maris, " though the 
plot is borrowed from Terence's " Adelphi, " there 
is a study of character and a pathos in the treatment of 
the aged lover that bears the print of the time and of 
Molikre's genius. In February of the next year 
Molifere himself married a young woman of his troupe, 
more than twenty years his junior, much to his future 
sorrow, though she was probably not so black as con- 
temporary scandal asserted and literary scavengers 
delight to repeat. 

In 1662 he touched more dangerous ground in 
" L'Ecole des femmes, " a covert naturalistic attack on 
hypocrisy and literal orthodoxy, by which he raised 
comedy from a diversion to a living teaching of a phi- 
losophy of life. Here first comedy became moral 
satire, and here first the aristocracy was ridiculed. 
This unchained a storm of rage, nursed by jealousy, 
such as actor-poet has seldom faced. He replied to his 
critics first in the witty " Critique de l'Ecole des 
femmes " and then in the " Impromptu de Versailles, " 
where his roused indignation did not scruple to name 
opponents and caricature rivals whom he scourged 
with caustic cruelty. In 1664 he renewed his attack 
on that most contemptible of all vices with three acts 
of " Tartufe, the Hypocrite, " in which he inaugurates 
the comedy of characters as distinct from that of man- 
ners. This open satire of false devotion, which was 
perhaps also a covert attack on all unnatural moral 
constraint, earned him from these professors of peace 
and good-will the pious wish that this " demon in 
human flesh " might " speedily be burned on earth, that 



78 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

he might burn the sooner in hell. " It was five years 
before he was suffered to act the entire play ; but the 
king's favor remained constant, and Molifere continued 
the fight with the yet more daring " Don Juan, " while 
light farces, such as " L' Amour mddecin, " relieved the 
serious contest. 

But, except for " Tartufe," it is with 1666 that the 
great manner of Molikre begins with " Le Misan- 
thrope, " which Boileau, Lessing, and Goethe unite to 
regard as his profoundest study of human character. 
Slowly but surely it has won its way to the foremost 
place in popular esteem also, and is now perhaps the 
most generally read and quoted of all his plays. 
Alceste, the noble pessimist soured by experience, 
Philinte, the easy-going social trimmer, the conceited 
poetaster Oronte, the witty and censorious Cdlimfene 
are types as enduring as society. 

Failing health now began to lessen his productivity, 
though not his wit. But in 1668 he brought out two 
masterpieces, the extremely witty " Amphitryon," and 
" George Dandin, " type of the man who marries above 
his station and suffers the consequences. Then fol- 
lowed that wonderful psychic picture " L'Avare, " the 
Miser. Then for three years (1669-1671), a succes- 
sion of light farces, among them the immortal " Bour- 
geois gentilhomme, * marks the recrudescence of his 
malady ; but in " Les Femmes savantes " the poet re- 
turned to the subject of the " Pr^cieuses, " and with his 
maturer powers attacked the admirers of pedantry and 
the affectation of learning, — a subject always new, that 
in our own day has inspired one of the happiest efforts 
of the modern stage, " Le Monde ou Ton s'ennuie. " 
This was his last important work. Already a con- 
sumptive cough was wearing him away. On February 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 79 

17, 1673, as he was acting in a new and almost 
fiercely bitter farce, " Le Malade imaginaire, * he rup- 
tured a blood-vessel in a spasm of coughing, and was 
carried from the stage to die. He was buried half 
clandestinely; for the Archbishop of Paris, feeling 
perhaps that Molifere's ethics were as irreconcilable 
with the received form of Christianity as ever those of 
Eabelais had been, forbade the elergy to say prayers 
for him. But he had given liberally of his wealth, 
and the poor crowded to his funeral ; yet the site of 
his grave is now uncertain. 

Molifere came at a propitious time, for comedy had 
not suffered from the false classicism of tragedy ; and 
if little of merit had yet been done, there was promise 
in the general interest, both popular and cultured, in 
the subject. The danger was that Spanish or classical 
models might be too slavishly followed. In his hands 
farce became comedy, and so won a dignity and an 
independence that gave it the freedom of conscious 
strength. And at the same time he broke a way of 
escape from the " alexandrine prison " and the bondage 
of the unities. Some of his very best work was done in 
prose, and he never allowed verse to fetter his thoughts 
or be more than a subordinate means to a higher end. 
Indeed, he could not have polished his work as Eacine 
did. In thirteen years he had written twenty-five 
plays, seven of them serious masterpieces ; he had 
been stage-manager, actor, and often manager of the 
royal festivals at Versailles. Life to him had been 
work, and it was fitting that he should die in harness. 

A man of indomitable energy, no dramatist ever united 
so much wit with so much seriousness as did Molikre. 
There is often a pathetic, even a sad, background to 
his work ; but he never allows this to get the better of 



80 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

his healthy humor, which depends for its effect, not 
on intrigue or play of words, but on the unexpected 
revelations of character that come like flashes in his 
plays. And here his satire is directed always against 
those social faults that disguise or suppress natural 
instincts, not against the excesses of nature. It is not 
ambition or even hedonism that he scourges, but 
hypocrisy, pedantry, amorous old age, prudery, ava- 
rice, or preciosity. 1 The purpose to hold the mirror up 
to Nature, that she may see her face and mend her 
ways, gives even his roaring farces an element of true 
comedy. But this purpose brings with it a tendency 
to typify phases of character, as with Eacine, rather 
than to present the complexity of human nature, as 
with Corneille ; and this disposition was long charac- 
teristic of French comedy. 2 In the analysis of charac- 
ter Shakspere is more profound, and he tells a story 
with far more dramatic force. Indeed, to Molifere the 
story, for its own sake, is a very minor matter; but 
Shakspere has less of the direct contact with and in- 
fluence on contemporary life that is the result of 
Molifere's naturalistic method and his study of the im- 
mediate environment. 

This method was that of his successors, of whom 
E^gnard only need be named, though his best work is 
disappointing, whether regarded in the light of what 
had preceded, or of the French comedy of to-day. For 
the tendency of the coming age was away from the natu- 
ralistic position. Yet, as one reviews the seventeenth 
century and the " classical " period, it is clear that 
naturalism was characteristic of its most successful 

1 Cp. Brunetiere, feudes critiques, iv. 185. 

2 Such titles as " The Miser," " The Misanthrope," or RegnarcVs 
" The Gambler," " The Distraught," illustrate this. 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 81 

work. It began with an attempt to codify and regu- 
late the individual conquests of the sixteenth century. 
Malherbe in poetry, Balzac in prose, undertook to be 
lawgivers for language and style. Just in so far as 
the century yielded, and the mental lassitude of the 
reaction from the Eenaissance made it easy to yield, 
to this gospel of artificiality, stagnation followed. In 
prose it was least possible to crib and confine ; and here 
there was the most varied development, from which 
it was easy to purge the chaff and the tinsel. In the 
drama the yoke was more felt, and in poetry most of 
all. But those poets and dramatists who were able to 
rise above these artificial constraints, and to build upon 
the foundations laid by the giants of the sixteenth 
century a structure of their own, the independent stu- 
dents of nature and society, — La Fontaine, Molifere, in 
a greater degree Corneille, in a less degree Eacine, — 
are those who are prized to-day, and prized most for 
that which the strict " classical " purists would have 
condemned. 



82 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 



CHAPTEE III. 

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

The eighteenth century is the age of Voltaire in a 
sense and to a degree that is unparalleled in European 
literary history. Even Goethe, who has also his " cen- 
tury, " is less typical, his sway less undisputed, and 
his excellence, though greater, less diversified ; for it 
is the peculiar distinction of Voltaire that there is no 
department of letters in which he did not hold a 
prominent place, while in most he stood by common 
consent at the head. 

Voltaire is not the author of the best lyrics of the 
century, but he comes just short of the highest place, 
being indeed all that a versifier can be who lacks what 
Horace calls the " divine breath " of poetry. His 
satires are the keenest, his tales in verse the wittiest, 
in the language. He is the author of the most correct 
serious epic and of the wittiest comic epic of his 
time ; he is incomparably its best novelist and its best 
dramatist. His essays in physics are said to be cred- 
itable ; and though he was neither a metaphysician nor 
a theologian, his works on ethics and theology are, 
and were, more read and prized than those of any of 
his philosophical or clerical contemporaries. He was 
far the best literary critic of that day, and its most 
popular historian. Besides this, he was the author of 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 83 

an infinite number of miscellaneous pamphlets, and 
of a correspondence of appalling volume, almost all of 
which is interesting, at least, for its polished form. To 
whatever field of literature we turn, we shall find his 
mark set up in it. It is not until toward the close of 
the century that Eousseau, in the ethical and political 
field, rivals, and for a time overshadows, the philoso- 
pher of Ferney. Voltaire will introduce us to the 
century and accompany us through it ; Eousseau will 
furnish its natural epilogue. 

Voltaire (1694-1778), whose real name of Arouet is 
seldom given him, was the son of a wealthy and rather 
distinguished Parisian notary ; but his early training 
was at the hands of his skeptical and scholarly god- 
father, the Abbd de Chateauneuf, and in 1704 he passed 
into the moulding hands of the Jesuits, who seem to 
have given him a better education than in later con- 
troversial years he liked to admit. He still saw 
much of the Abbe, and was far from cloistered. In- 
deed, during the first year of his school life he so won 
the attention and interest of his godfather's friend, 
the famous Ninon de l'Enclos, that she bequeathed him 
two thousand livres, — " to buy books, " she said. 

He left school in 1711, and pretended to study law ; 
but all his ambitions were clearly literary, and he was 
already a member of the noted literary circle, " du 
Temple. " His father, dissatisfied with such vagaries, 
sent him first to Caen ; then to the Hague, where he got 
entangled with a young Protestant lady, to the yet 
more intense disgust of his parent, who actually 
obtained a lettre de cachet from the king authorizing 
his son's confinement. But he made no use of it; for 
Voltaire, always cautious in his daring, returned to 
Paris and the law, and occupied his mischievous energy 



84 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

in writing libellous poems, until the perplexed father 
had to send him away once more. It was not till 
1715 that he returned to the laxer society of the Be- 
gency and to his literary circle, whom he presently 
charmed by his first play, " GEdipe. " But his itching 
fingers, under the provoking inspiration of the ambi- 
tious Duchess of Maine, were soon writing epigrams 
on the Eegent himself that invited and justified a brief 
exile (1716), followed by confinement for ten months 
in the Bastille and a second short banishment from 
the capital. Yet, though the witty Orleans did not 
trust Voltaire, he enjoyed him; and late in 1718 the 
poet was able to produce " CEdipe " with success at 
Paris, whence political squibs soon drove him for the 
fourth time, though the good-humored Eegent shortly 
after gave him a pension, and seems to have employed 
him in the secret diplomatic service from 1722 to 
1725. His social position was already assured by the 
death of his father, who left him a respectable com- 
petency ; and he occupied himself during these years as 
a literary dilettante with an epic, " La Henriade, * and 
a second tragedy, " Mariamne. " But in 1725 a quar- 
rel with the Chevalier de Eohan sent him first to the 
Bastille, then to England, — an event of such impor- 
tance to his development that it forms, like Goethe's 
visit to Italy, the turning-point in his intellectual 
life. 

In England Voltaire got, first of all, a very con- 
siderable sum of money, which he employed so well in 
fortunate speculations and investments, that his future 
life was always free from financial care, and, at the 
last, almost seignorial. This made it possible for him 
to be more independent of patronage and favor than 
any other literary man in France ; and for the work 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 85 

he had before him such independence was necessary. 
Then, too, contact with English character and institu- 
tions could not but have a deep effect on so mobile a 
genius. The contrast between France and England, 
greater then than now, stimulated his mind to more 
serious thoughts on society and philosophy, and he re- 
turned to France, more capable, perhaps, than any 
other Frenchman of seeing the weak sides of her con- 
stitution and polity, and ready to offer opinions on 
them, which are often specious, though seldom pro- 
found. He made also a serious though brief effort 
to understand Shakspere ; and even if he failed to ap- 
prehend him, he learned much from the English stage 
that affected his literary taste and that of the French 
public also, to whom he was first to introduce one des- 
tined to have the profoundest influence on the litera- 
ture of later generations. 1 Even more important to 
his intellectual development was the study of English 
science and philosophy, especially of Newton and 
Locke, by which he systematized his views of nature 
and religion. 

After several tentative visits, Voltaire returned to 
France in 1729, where he continued his dramatic 
activity with " Zaire " (1732) and some inferior plays, 
wrote his " History of Charles XII. , " and began his 
comic epic " La Pucelle, " the source of much amuse- 
ment and of much deserved censure through many 
years of his life. But his restless spirit soon got him 
in hot water again with a volume of skeptical " Letters 
on the English," and with the " Temple of Taste," a 
satire on the poetasters of the time, accompanied by 
some remarks on Pascal, in which the orthodox scented 

1 See Pellissier, La Litterature contemporaine, p. 69, Le Drame 
shakespearien. 



86 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

danger and heresy. They had the book burned, but 
the author laughed at them from across the frontier in 
Lorraine. 

Here, soon after, he settled for some years at Cirey 
with Madame du Chatelet, the " respectable Emily " of 
his correspondence, for his hostess ; and it is probable 
that ties closer than Platonic bound them, though Vol- 
taire's loves, like Jean-Jacques', were always more 
cerebral than material, and Emily did not hesitate to 
supplement his affections by more commonplace attach- 
ments. He had now ample leisure as well as security, 
and here first he took up the serious profession of 
authorship. In 1735, with a cheerful self-confidence 
that was hardly justified, he produced a treatise on 
Metaphysics less philosophical than controversial ; in 
1736 came a popular exposition of the Newtonian 
system, and " Alzire, " a drama of Peru ; and this was 
followed by " Le Mondain, " whose outspoken opti- 
mism, if not essentially anti-Christian, could hardly 
fail to seem so to the representatives of the French 
establishment. 

The result was a long and bitter controversy, traces 
of which can be found in the allusions to the " Jour- 
nal des Tr^voux, " to Frdron and Desfontaines, which 
abound in his epigrams and satires. To-day, how- 
ever, " Le Mondain " seems far less offensive in its 
language and tendency than " La Pucelle, " from which 
he still continued to "snatch a fearful joy," reading 
it to friends whenever he got a chance, while he 
guarded it from publication with ostentatious anxiety. 
During all these years his pen was tireless. The mass 
of minor work produced was enormous, and by 1741 
he had completed " Merope " and " Mohamet, " dramas 
second only to " Zaire. " 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 87 

Meantime, since 1736, he had been corresponding 
with the philosophic king, Frederic of Prussia, whom 
he met in 1740 and visited in 1743. Absence had 
now restored him to the graces of the Parisian court; 
in 1745 he was made royal historiographer, a post 
honored by the names of Eacine and Boileau ; and in 
1746 he entered the Academy. But his literary in- 
discretions soon obliged him to leave these honors and 
French soil, still accompanied by the " respectable 
Emily," whose death at Luneville in 1749 left him a 
man of fifty-five, famous, rich, but without a home 
and without a country. It was natural, under these 
conditions, that he should lend a favorable ear to the 
invitation of Frederic to come to share, or, as he would 
interpret it, to lead, the brilliant group of literary 
men which that great king had gathered at his court. 
So, after a year of restless wandering and malicious 
activity that found its chief expression in satirical 
tales, he went to Berlin in July, 1750. 

Voltaire's stay in Germany had more influence on 
the literary men of that country than it had on him. 
His quarrels and rupture with Frederic (1753) do not 
concern us. They were too great intellectually to get 
on well together, but too great also not to admire one 
another genuinely when apart. In his relations with 
the literary men of Frederic's circle, Voltaire appears in 
an unfavorable light, showing most strongly here, what 
he never failed to show elsewhere, vanity, spiteful- 
ness, financial unscrupulousness, a great desire to 
proclaim disagreeable and dangerous truths, and an 
equally earnest determination at all moral costs to 
avoid the consequences of so doing. 

"During his three years at Berlin, Voltaire finished 
his famous essay on the Eeign of Louis XIV. , and his 



88 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

fiercest literary lampoon, the " Diatribe du Docteur 
Akakia, " an insult to his fellow-guest, Maupertuis, 
which resulted in the severing of their relations, and 
closed Prussia to him as France was already closed. 
His " Essai sur les moeurs " now appeared, and made 
his position even more difficult ; so it was natural that 
after some travels he should turn to Switzerland, — 
then, in spite of provincial narrowness, a noble refuge 
of free-thought. Here he could lead an independent 
life; and here, in or near Geneva, he made his 
" home, " the first he had ever had, from 1754 till his 
death, nearly a quarter of a century later. At first he 
lived in the suburbs of Geneva ; but he soon bought a 
large estate at Ferney, just across the French frontier, 
and so administered his domain that the population of 
Ferney grew under his fostering care from fifty at his 
coming to twelve hundred at his death. But he also 
prudently acquired various houses of refuge in Savoy, 
at Lausanne, and in other jurisdictions. He managed 
his large domain with patriarchal shrewdness, practised 
the most open hospitality, and permitted himself the 
luxury of a private theatre, as George Sand did later 
at Nohant, and also of a church, for which he ob- 
tained a relic from the Pope. He dedicated it " To 
God from Voltaire " {Deo erexit Voltaire), and ostenta- 
tiously communicated there, much to the vexation of 
his bishop. He made Ferney what Weimar became 
a half -century later, — the Mecca of literary Europe. 
All flocked to do him homage ; few had the temerity 
to oppose his dicta. His influence, both in literature 
and ethics, was felt over all the Continent, and main- 
tained by epigrams in meteoric showers, and by letters 
that made the circuit of the literary world. These 
last, of which the complete edition of his works counts 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 89 

some ten thousand, were the chief source of his power, 
and perhaps the master work of his genius. 

The most enduring works of this period are, first of 
all, " Candide, " a prose tale directed against the re- 
ceived orthodoxy rather than against anything distinc- 
tively Christian, and for irony perhaps unsurpassed in 
modern times; then the " Commentary on Corneille, " 
generously undertaken to relieve the necessities of that 
dramatist's niece ; but perhaps most of all, the pam- 
phlets written in defence of liberty of thought and 
against the tyranny of persecution, as it was even then 
being illustrated in France in the cases of Calas, of 
Sirven, of Espinasse, and others. That these men 
were mostly Protestants was natural, for only Cath- 
olics had the power to stifle thought, though the 
Huguenots might share the desire. The creed for 
which they suffered contributed nothing to the inter- 
est he felt in their wrongs. Indeed he had not a whit 
more sympathy with the infallible Bible than with 
the infallible Pope, and, like Erasmus, he had no 
wish to break with authority on a matter so uncertain, 
so incapable of proof, and to him so unimportant as 
orthodoxy, if he could but secure toleration. His 
often repeated exhortation " Ecrasez l'infame * does 
not allude, as some have vainly supposed, to the 
essence of Christianity, still less to the Christ, but to 
bigoted intolerance based on ignorance and self- 
seeking, such as he thought he found exemplified 
in the Jesuits of his time and their helpers, Fr^ron 
and Palissot; though Voltaire's ethics were really 
more antagonistic to Jansenists than to Jesuits. 
They continued the traditions of Eabelais and La 
Fontaine, but with a naturalism that is less rationalis- 
tic than hedonistic. 



90 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

Many years were passed at Ferney in dignified ease, 
and Voltaire was a frail old man of eighty -four when 
the triumphs of Beaumarchais , " Barber of Seville " 
roused his vanity for a journey to Paris to witness the 
production of his own just completed " Ir&ne. " Its 
sixth performance, March 16, 1778, was an unequalled 
ovation for its laurel-crowned author, and one of the 
three or four great days of French theatrical history. 
Soon after, Franklin brought him his grandson to be 
blessed, and at a solemn stance of the Academy they 
embraced in true sentimental style. He even began 
another tragedy ; but the old man had over-estimated 
the power of his body to follow his tireless mind. 
Presently came a collapse of physical strength so rapid 
that when the hour came at which all Catholics desire 
the last sacraments, he had no longer sufficient self- 
control to maintain the solemn farce of a lifetime. 
He motioned the priest away, with a weak sincerity 
that would surely have cast a gloom over his last 
moments had it been granted him to recover a con- 
sciousness of his inconsistency. Dying thus (May 
30-31), it was necessary to inter him in haste, before 
the episcopal inhibition should intervene to exclude 
him from consecrated ground. In 1791 the remains 
were taken to the Pantheon; but the sarcophagus, 
when opened in 1864, was found empty, the mocker 
mocking even from the grave. 

We have now to consider the work of Voltaire, and 
with it the work of his lesser contemporaries in the 
various fields of his multifarious activity. 

In lyric poetry not much could be expected of a 
period that continued the traditions of classical objec- 
tivity. l The first place during the earlier half of the 

1 Cp. Brunetiere, Poesie lyrique, i. 48. 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY. 91 

century belongs undoubtedly to Jean-Baptiste Eousseau 
(1670-1741), who, like Voltaire, was associated with 
the coterie " du Temple, " and, like him, was in con- 
stant trouble because he could bridle neither his tongue 
nor his pen. He, too, was exiled in 1712, and passed 
the rest of his life at Brussels, continuing more indus- 
trious to make enemies than others are to get friends. 
His poetic work is not large. It consists mainly of 
panegyric or sacred odes, apparently studied from 
Boileau, and of licentious or cynical epigrams, which 
show the greater talent of the two, and passed with 
the classical critics for an imitation of Marot's " 616- 
gant badinage, " as the odes did of his " Psalms. " But 
J. -B. Eousseau was neither a great man nor a great 
poet, and to say that he was the best of his time may 
excuse from speaking of his fellows. 

A generation later than Eousseau is Piron (1689- 
1773), probably after Voltaire the most brilliant epi- 
grammatist of France, but too witty to be on good 
terms with his fellow wits, and too incapable, as his 
dramas showed, of any sustained effort, though many 
of the best lines of his sparkling comedy, " La Mdtro- 
manie, " have passed into the small change of cultured 
conversation. Another writer of light verse is Gresset, 
a " one-poem poet. " His * Vert- Vert, " a parrot who 
passes from a monastery to a nunnery and picks up 
phrases far from monastic on the journey, is perhaps 
the best in its kind since La Fontaine, and shows a 
more kindly humor than the " Contes " of Voltaire or 
the work of his other contemporaries. Gresset, for the 
greater part of his life, was connected with a religious 
order, and he is one of the very few poets of this time 
who never pander to vice; but his character, though 
gentle, was weak, and the close of his life was wholly 



92 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

under the direction of those who thought the graceful 
badinage of " Vert- Vert " a matter for fasting and pen- 
ance. Later fabulists, Florian and Marmontel, pre- 
served the traditions of the apologue ; but their work 
has only historic interest. 

In the honeyed, amorous, or licentious verse of 
the " glow-worm " type, Voltaire was surpassed, and 
might well be content to be, by the perfumed lu- 
bricity of Gentil-Bernard, Dorat, and Parny, the last 
a Creole who brought at first some breath of fresh life 
into French verse, but later lost this facile touch, so 
that his longer poems have been judiciously pronounced 
" equally remarkable for blasphemy, obscenity, extrav- 
agance, and dulness. " It must be allowed that if in 
this century there is no verse that is extremely good, 
there is much that is extremely bad, and very little 
that is worse than these later poems of Parny. But 
the best in this kind are only triflers. Much later 
and a step higher are the anacreontic Desaugiers 
and Eouget de Lisle, whose immortal " Marseillaise " 
is less characteristic than his convivial verses, which 
mark the true ancestor of Bdranger. In the descriptive 
school of poetry this century pointed with pride to 
Delille, the French Thomson, whose insatiate thirst 
for paraphrase turns backgammon into " that noisy 
game where horn in hand the adroit player calculates 
an uncertain chance, " while sugar masquerades as " the 
American honey which the African squeezes from the 
juicy reed. " Poetry became a puzzle till the revolt of 
the Eomanticists brought plain speaking and the mot- 
propre into fashion again, substituting virility for 
these elaborate conceits. 

It need not be said that Voltaire had cultivated all 
these fields except the sacred canticle. He had written 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 93 

also the only serious epic of the century worthy to be 
named, though " La Henriade " is poor enough in its 
jejune correctness; and his " La Pucelle, " with all its 
faults, is still the best comic epic of France. His 
versified " Contes, " though malicious in their ethical 
bearing, are the wittiest and best told since La Fon- 
taine, and his satires are hardly second to the best 
work of B^gnier and Boileau. No man had so great a 
command of vers de societe as he. He never rose to 
true poetry ; that divine spark was denied him. He 
lacked the sincerity that springs from noble convic- 
tions. But he produced an enormous mass of what 
has been justly called the " ne plus ultra of verse 
that is not poetry. " 

Yet the taste for a truer poetry was not dead in 
France. These years saw a revival of interest in the 
great sixteenth-century poets ; a collection of the old 
" Fabliaux " was reprinted, as well as the works of 
Marot, Villon, and Eabelais ; all of which had its 
reward in the Eomantic School of 1830. But it was 
reserved for the very close of the century to produce a 
true poet, and to guillotine him just as he had revealed 
his promise. Andrd Chdnier (1762-1794), Greek by 
birth, half Greek by parentage, wholly classical in 
tastes and studies, attained the aspiration of the 
Classicists. But, in spite of Ch^nier's genius, the 
more fully he realized his ambition, the more artificial 
he became ; and so he had little influence in speeding 
or retarding the development of the Eomantic School, 
which indeed was well advanced before the tardy pub- 
lication of the greater and better part of his poems 
(1819). 

In regular tragedy that had languished since the 
death of Eacine, Voltaire's supremacy was not ques- 



94 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

tioned. 1 Indeed, what deserves mention outside his 
work does so almost wholly because it points to a revolt 
from traditions that he was anxious to maintain. 
Among his fifty pieces the comedies are less good than 
one would anticipate from the general character of his 
mind ; even " Nanine, " which he drew from Eichard- 
son's " Pamela, " is only the best among second-class 
work. But if he never thoroughly mastered the tech- 
nique of comedy, his best tragedies, some ten, approach 
more nearly to the correctness of Eacine than any work 
of an age that had nothing to suggest the grandeur 
of Corneille, still less the profound psychology of 
Molifere ; he was the inventor of " local color " in tra- 
gedy, and in the dexterous management of the tragic 
form he may have surpassed in " Mdrope " and " Zaire " 
either of his great predecessors. His idea was to per- 
fect the tragedy of Eacine, itself the most perfect in 
his view that the human mind had yet produced. This 
he hoped to attain by increasing the action and height- 
ening the spectacular effect. But while he laid stress 
rightly on these elements of interest, he found him- 
self unconsciously carried away from Eacine, toward 
the processes of Corneille, and even to the Shakspere 
he rejected. Yet his reforms seem timid enough to- 
day, and at the time attracted little animadversion. 

For a bolder note of revolt had been sounded by 
Lamotte's attack on the regular tragedy, challenging 
the authority of the unities and the prestige of the 
ancients, though in his own best drama, " Inez de 
Castro, " Lamotte had lacked the courage of his convic- 
tions. These were, indeed, far in advance of his time, 
and the contemporary tragedians, Cr^billon pere and 

1 Cp. Brunetiere, Epoques du theatre francais, p. 240, and Histoire 
et litterature, iii. 95. 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 95 

his fellows, kissed the rod of tradition and of Voltaire, 
though Crdbillon has occasional bursts of more Cor- 
neillian power than Voltaire ever attains. But he had 
also more Eomantic exaggeration, and his characters 
show even less of the unconquerable mind, the strong 
will, that distinguished Corneille. Late in the century 
the standard of revolt was again raised by Ducis, who 
adapted several plays of Shakspere to French taste, 
between 1767 and 1792, and broke the way for greater 
successors. 

But besides these revolts from regular tragedy, a 
radical modification of it appeared during this century 
in the tragedy of common life, which, with a parallel 
breaking down of the regular comedy to the comedy 
of pathos, confused the distinctions which had sep- 
arated the tragedy and comedy of the Classicists. Then 
the tragedie lourgeoise and the comedie larmoyante 
inevitably merged into the melodrama, or drame, 
fathered by La Chauss^e 1 and ably advocated by 
Diderot. 2 The essence of all this work is that the 
scenes shall be taken from contemporary life in its 
serious or serio-comic aspects. But though these be- 
ginnings of a very large and important section of the 
modern drama are of great historic interest, intrinsi- 
cally they present little that is worthy to survive. 

In comedy, Voltaire's best work was outranked both 
by his predecessor, Le Sage, and by his successor, 
Beaumarchais, while Destouches, Marivaux, and Se- 
daine were his not unworthy compeers. Le Sage 
(1668-1747), who is better known as the author of 
" Gil Bias, " wrote also a multitude of short farces 

1 See Lanson, La Chaussee ; Brunetiere, Epoques du theatre fran- 
cais, p. 275 sqq. 

2 In his "Essai sur la poesie dramatique," 1758. 



96 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

and operettas which stood in high repute ; while his 
" Crispin " and " Tucaret " are true comedies, quite 
worthy of Moliere. Both are prose studies of contem- 
porary society, — the former more lively than probable, 
but scintillating with wit and palpitating with comic 
life ; the latter more seriously critical, a cruel and 
realistic satire on the moneyed class that was already 
beginning to contest the social pre-eminence of the 
corrupted nobility, which in its turn received merited 
castigation, while provincial narrowness and mercantile 
pettiness were not spared, and the characters in both 
plays, as we should expect from his novels, were more 
completely rounded than the typical figures of Moliere. 

But if Le Sage, at his best, leads the stage in the 
former half of the century, Destouches is not far be- 
hind, and his work maintains a remarkable level of 
excellence, though he never deserts the typical method 
of Molifere and B^gnard. His " Philosophe rnari^ " 
and " Les Glorieux " have life in them still. In Dan- 
court, too, one may trace the evolution of the comedy 
of condition from that of character. Where Molifere, 
B^gnard, and Le Sage had sought to combine various 
phases of a social vice into the miser, the misanthrope, 
the gambler, or the financier, he divides the phases 
among a group of characters, and writes of " Les 
Agioteurs, " " Les Bourgeoises a la mode, " or " Les 
Enfants de Paris. " 

Marivaux was a man of more originality, both for 
good and ill, in the drama and the novel also. His 
manner was sufficiently unique to furnish to the lan- 
guage the word marivavdage, which now stands for a 
rather effeminate wit and affectation of simplicity. 
But Marivaux was better than this word might im- 
ply. He was, above all else, a delicate, subtle, precieux 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 97 

psychologist ; and his dramatic mission was the apology 
of sentiment and the analysis of love, till then hardly 
attempted in comedy. This gave to women an equal 
prominence with men in the drama. In Molifere the 
tender passion is assumed as a state ; with Marivaux 
it is a development. His dramas begin with the 
dawn of love, and end usually with its declaration. 
As he said himself, " he spied out in the human heart 
all the nooks where love might hide when he feared 
to show himself, and the object of each of his comedies 
was to make love come out of one of those nooks ; " to 
which Brunetiere adds that if you substitute jealousy 
for love, you will define the tragedy of Eacine. They 
are trifles light as air, but delicious in their apparent 
naivete and hidden depth. There is, indeed, little or 
no intrigue, and so there is danger of monotony if his 
plays 1 be read consecutively ; but it is a relief to find 
the old theatrical apparatus and conventions laid aside 
with a light heart for stories that transport us to a 
delicate and amiable fairyland, where we recognize 
ourselves as we should like to be. But though the 
idea of the development of love as a subject for comedy 
was a most fruitful seed, and all his successors profited 
by it according to their power, Marivaux founded no 
school ; for as the century proceeded, the dramatic cur- 
rent was deflected by the stronger philosophical bent. 
The desire to sway the feelings and to preach a shal- 
low, sentimental optimism takes possession of the 
stage under the banner of naturalism in the Tragedie 
bourgeoise, or of pathetic sentiment in the Comedie 

1 The best are " Le Legs," " Double inconstance," "Jeu d'amour 
et du hazard." See Larroumet, Marivaux ; Faguet, xviii. siecle ; Lan- 
son, Litterature, p. 639 ; Brunetiere, Etudes critiques, vols, ii. and iii. ; 
Brunetiere, Epoques du theatre ; Lemaitre, Impressions de theatre, 
vols. ii. and iv. 

7 



98 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

larmoyante. The development is interesting, but, as 
has been said, the plays that illustrate it deserve no 
individual notice. 

This change is often attributed to Diderot ; but the 
reflected lustre of his achievements in literature and 
philosophy has probably made men attribute to him 
dramatic services that belong to his predecessors, no- 
tably to Marivaux, Lamotte, and Destouches. 1 His 
plays, " Le Fils naturel " and " Le Pfere de famille, " 
were unfortunate illustrations of excellent theories, 
derived in part from the German Lessing, whom in 
turn they inspired ; but there was nothing new in his 
ideas, nothing that had not been anticipated for the 
pathetic comedy by La Chaussde, while in tragedy 
Lamotte had demanded the use of prose and more action 
as early as 1721, frankly setting up the English stand- 
ard for imitation. But if Diderot was neither first to 
preach nor to practise either the bourgeois tragedy or 
melodrama, neither was he the most eloquent pro- 
claimer of the new doctrine, for that leaf must be 
added to the dubious laurels of Eousseau. Indeed, his 
original theory that the drama should present condi- 
tions rather than characters, " that the profession 
should become the principal object and the character 
only accessory, " was rather retrogressive in its ten- 
dency, though it helped, perhaps, to turn the drama- 
tists of the later nineteenth century to the modification 
of character by profession or environment, which is an 
important factor in the realistic art of Dumas fils and 
Emile Augier. 

More truly and less obtrusively philosophic than the 

1 See Ducros, Diderot, Paris, 1894; Reinach, Diderot, Paris, 1894 ; 
and a notice of these books by Lemaitre in " Journal des debats " 
(Ilebcl), 4th and 11th August, 1894. 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 99 

men of whom we have just spoken is Beaumarchais, 1 
the most important dramatic figure in the latter part 
of the century, though he was the author of but two 
really successful plays. Beaumarchais had seen more 
of social life than any of his predecessors ; for though, 
like Eousseau, the son of a watchmaker, he had in- 
gratiated himself by skill and good fortune in court 
circles, where he made a wealthy marriage and in- 
fluential connections in banking circles, while his 
" Memoirs, " by their scathing exposure of the corrup- 
tion of an unpopular Parlement, made him popular also 
with the influential bourgeoisie. A visit to England, 
undertaken in the government interest, had much 
influence on the relations of France to the North 
American colonies, then about to revolt from England ; 
and its literary effect on Beaumarchais was almost as 
determining as it had been on Voltaire, for it needed 
only that to his knowledge of society and the reckless- 
ness characteristic at once of the spirit of the time and 
of his own, there should be added the art of English 
comedy to inspire his native wit with the epoch- 
making " Barber of Seville " (1775) and the " Marriage 
of Figaro " (1784). Barber Figaro, the hero of both 
plays, is a light-hearted, versatile, shrewd scapegrace, 
with a good deal of that worldly philosophy which 
was assisting in the disintegration of society, and pre- 
paring the Eevolution which these comedies, by their 
levelling tendencies, did much to provoke and to has- 
ten ; though Beaumarchais had probably no more serious 
purpose than delight in his own wit. He wished to 
fire a squib and exploded the magazine. 2 

1 See Lintilhac, Beaumarchais. 

2 Modern types of Figaro are to be found in Augier's "Les 
Effrontes " and u Le Fils de Giboyer." The political satire finds a 
more serious parallel in Sardou's " Ragabas." See Brunetiere, 1. c. 297. 



100 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

These comedies mark a decided advance in the de- 
velopment of dialogue, which becomes more precise, 
epigrammatic, and clear-cut. Beaumarchais' spark- 
ling verve is sustained in a way till then approached 
only by Molifere, and hardly attained even by him. 
Indeed, it will often seem that the author is too 
prodigal, or that his hearers were men of quicker wits 
than ours ; for we hardly conceive that such keenness 
and brilliancy should be fully valued at one reading, 
still less when heard but once on the stage. If it were 
not a paradox, one would be inclined to say that the 
chief fault of Beaumarchais is the monotony of his 
scintillating brilliancy. But, besides this, in con- 
struction and the management of intrigue, the plays 
touched the high-water mark of the century. " Origi- 
nal, incomparable, inimitable, unique," they earned 
an unparalleled success, and left a tradition that after 
four decades of woful mediocrity was revived by Hugo 
and Dumas, and inspired the operas of Mozart and 
Eossini. 

This intervening mediocrity was due in great meas- 
ure to the deadening effect of sentimentality, 1 and to 
the engrossing interest of politics. From 1789 till 
the end of the century, plays were more often praised 
and damned for their sentiments than for their merits. 
The history of the stage during these years is of great 
interest, but it belongs no longer to the history of lit- 
erature. 2 Yet the drama of the century as a whole, 
though in no sense great, was at least superior to its 
poetry, and showed surer signs of the Eomantic 
awakening. 

1 See Diderot as cited by Brunetiere, 1. c. 294. 

2 See Lumiere, Le Theatre francais pendant la revolution; Wel- 
schinger, Le Theatre de la revolution ; and Brunetiere, Etudes critiques, 
ii. 322. 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 101 

During this whole period prose had been encroach- 
ing on the domain of dramatic poetry, and after its 
close the alexandrine enjoyed only an asthmatic re- 
vival. It is in this century that prose becomes the 
natural vehicle of almost every phase of thought and 
feeling, occupying a far more varied, vast, and im- 
portant field than ever before, and for the first time 
surpassing verse in literary value. This is pre-emi- 
nently the century of the " philosophers, " the age of 
scientific inquiry and of comparative study of history 
and institutions. And though it is true that none of 
these fields belongs to pure literature, many of these 
works show such intrinsic beauty and had such influ- 
ence on imaginative prose that no literary study can 
ignore them. 

The first of the historians of this century belongs 
rather to the preceding. The " Memoirs " of Saint- 
Simon (1678-1755) show the unreconciled feudal noble, 
while his treatment of language is as autocratic as 
though Balzac and Vaugelas had lived in vain. As a 
contemporary said, " Saint-Simon saw the nation in the 
nobility, the nobility in the peerage, and the peerage 
in himself. " These " Memoirs, * often amusing, some- 
times exasperating, are always valuable for the history 
of their time; but they are not characteristic of its 
literary or intellectual movement. In Rollin (1661- 
1741), on the other hand, the literary instinct wholly 
predominated. Entirely engrossed in making himself 
clear and his subject interesting, he does not rise 
above the amiable raconteur. This would apply also 
to Voltaire's " Charles XII " and " Peter the Great; " 
but in his " Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des 
nations, " Voltaire shows, and is first to show, a genuine 
effort to study the development of civilization under 



102 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

the varying conditions of character and destiny; and 
thus, though he could not emancipate himself from the 
passions of his time nor observe without prejudice, 
though the age of Louis XIV. was to him " the most 
glorious epoch of the human mind " in spite of " the 
tricky and meddling clergy that marred it," though 
the story of Charles Martel and Eoland " deserved no 
more to be written than that of bears and wolves," 
though he saw in religion everywhere and always the 
chief obstacle to human progress, yet he inaugurated 
in this essay the science of comparative history. 

In this field he was almost immediately followed by 
Montesquieu, — a far more catholic spirit, and without 
a trace of the iconoclastic optimism so general in his 
time. Already, in 1721, his " Lettres persanes " had 
shown him a keen critic of contemporary society, its 
foibles, its government, and its creed. A more serious 
and truly philosophic mind appeared in his " Grandeur 
and Decadence of the Eomans " (1734); and this was 
but a foretaste of the great " Spirit of Laws " (1748), 
where the relations of law to government, manners, 
climate, religion, and trade were discussed with a 
sweep of vision that embraced every age and country. 
In it all, however, Montesquieu was a student much 
more than a reformer, — more eager to see how what is 
came to be than to think how he can make it better. 
But though he was not himself a revolutionist, nor 
incited to change, his book, by calling attention to the 
superiority of the English constitution, had an immense 
and enduring influence in determining the destinies of 
France and of the whole Continent, which has come 
more and more to the constitutionalism of which he 
was the greatest herald. 

Another historian, who left a far different impress 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 103 

on the time, was Mably, whose perversely persistent 
exaltation of a false classicism took a hold on the pop- 
ular fancy that explains much of the masquerading of 
the early revolutionary period. More directly political 
in its tone was Baynal's " Histoire philosophique des 
Indes, " — a co-operative work, that pretends to be a 
colonial history and is really a demagogic declamation, 
of which a single example may suffice. " Cowardly 
people, imbecile herd, " says the historian, " you are 
content to groan when you should roar. " What must 
the philosophic princes have thought of this, the Aus- 
trian Joseph, the Czarina Catherine, and King Fred- 
eric, who had trusted the charmer of Ferney when he 
said that " the cause of the philosophers was the cause 
of the princes " ? They might see now that the attack 
on the Church inevitably reacted on the divine right of 
royalty, and that history was only a pulpit for the 
" philosophers, " who soon found their voices drowned 
by the revolutionary orators, Mirabeau, Barnave, 
Vergniaud, Danton, — a race silenced and superseded 
by the man of the 18th Brumaire. 

Never have self-styled " philosophers " exercised so 
direct an influence on society as in France at this 
time. Among them Voltaire holds the chief and cen- 
tral place ; but the radical group at his left is more 
witty, keen, vigorous, and loud than the conservatives 
who make but a poor and timid show in defence of in- 
herited faith. This new philosophy drew its inspira- 
tion from England, chiefly from Locke ; and, like him, 
the French metaphysicians aimed to be clear rather 
than profound, gliding over difficulties and aspiring to 
systematic completeness at the cost sometimes of com- 
mon-sense. Voltaire almost boasts of his superficiality. 
" Throw my work into the fire," he exclaims, " if it is 



104 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

not as clear as a fable of La Fontaine. " Or again, 
" The French have no idea how much trouble I take to 
give them no trouble. " But he was seldom anxious to 
push his thought to its legitimate conclusion. He 
used it as a solvent of old, incrusted prejudices, not 
as a rule of new life. He remained a deist, and 
showed more than once that his faith was real and not 
conventional. This antithesis between his philosophy 
and his creed bore good fruit ; it made him the elo- 
quent and successful preacher of toleration. 

His successors were more consistent. Condillac 
forced sensationalism to a dizzy brink, where Diderot 
and La Mettrie nursed their pure materialism. And 
from this verge Helvdtius and D'Holbach soon took the 
step that landed them in a cynical atheism which pro- 
voked a protest even from Frederic and Yoltaire. But 
they could not banish the spirit they had conjured, a 
ruthless iconoclasm that found its fullest representa- 
tive in the " Encyclopedic, " 2 the joint production of 
Diderot, D'Alembert, and most of the radical think- 
ers of the time. The reception given to their work 
amply testifies that these men were in accord with the 
people. The forty -five hundred copies of its twenty- 
eight folio volumes were hardly dry before they were 
sold, and the last set brought the price of rarity. Vol- 
taire's contributions are collected in his " Dictionnaire 
philosophique. " The articles are full of personalities 
and of mocking irreverence, which he seemed to think 
justified by the nature of his adversaries and of their 
cause. Yet they form some of the most characteristic 
and typical of his whole " hundred volumes," and are 
still readable in spite of the alphabetical arrangement. 

1 An admirable account of this work is contained in John Morley's 
Diderot, i. 113-241. 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 105 

Their value, however, is literary and not philosophical, 
at least in any sense that we now attach to that word. 

To eighteenth-century France a " philosopher * is a 
man disabused of all " the long results of time, " a man 
who looks at life with shrewd but shallow common- 
sense. And until it was weighed, this specious 
optimism was naturally of immense popularity. In- 
deed the philosophers could truly say that the world 
was gone after them. The mania for collections, the 
dilettante study of "natural history," date from this 
time. Hundreds busied themselves thus with physics 
and chemistry, and it was especially for them that 
Voltaire had popularized Newton's theories in his 
" English Letters. " In their optimistic hopefulness 
the puzzle of Nature seemed almost solved. Like 
Wagner in Goethe's "Faust," they felt they knew 
much and hoped to know all, — an attitude indicated 
by the inscription on Buffon's statue at Versailles : " A 
genius equal to the majesty of Nature. " Indeed, as 
they approach the maelstrom of the Ee volution, a ver- 
tigo seems to seize on these minds cut loose from the 
moorings of faith and drifting into unknown seas. 
" Enlightenment is so diffused, " says Voltaire, with 
his genial optimism, " that there must be an outburst 
on the first occasion. . . . Our young men are for- 
tunate. They will see fine things. " But he looked 
at the matter always as an aristocrat. " As for the 
canaille," he said, "it will always remain canaille. 
I do not concern myself with it. " 1 Eousseau had a 
truer and profounder foresight. " Eely not, " he says 
in " Emile," " on the existing social order, forgetting 
that this order is subject to inevitable revolutions, and 
that you cannot foresee nor prevent what may come on 

1 See Brunetiere, Etudes critiques, i. 181 sqq. 



106 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

your children. The great will become small, the rich 
poor, the monarch subject. We approach the critical 
state and the age of revolutions. " 

Eousseau, not Voltaire, is the seer of the closing 
century ; and he has put this startling prophecy, not in 
an historical or philosophical treatise, but in a novel, 
" Emile," which, with his " Nouvelle Heloise, " exer- 
cised a more fateful influence on mankind than any 
works of pure imagination that literary history knows. 
So we are brought back from a philosophical digression 
to pure literature, to the novelists and critics of the 
eighteenth century. Criticism may, indeed, be briefly 
dismissed. Voltaire is once more easily first with his 
" Commentary on Corneille ; " but Diderot's annual 
" Salons " * were epoch-making for the rational study 
of art, while his dramatic essays popularized a natural- 
ism that they did not originate, and the * Correspond- 
ence" 2 of his friend Melchior Grimm with German 
courts may still be read with interest for its subjective 
originality. Only these three influenced the future; 
for La Harpe, in spite of his contemporary popular- 
ity, is but the talented representative of a sterile 
conservatism. 

In no department of literature was progress more 
varied or the outlook more hopeful during this entire 
period than in prose fiction, which was replacing the 
drama as the chief literary genre. Le Sage shares with 
Voltaire the honors of the first rank; but excellent 
work was done by Prevost, La Clos, and Louvet, in 

1 Brunetiere, op. eft. ii. 285, criticises them very severely. 

2 The enterprise begun by Kaynal was conducted by Grimm from 
1753 to 1773, and continued by Meister till 1790. Diderot and Mme. 
d'Epernay also shared in it. The whole is best edited by Tourneux, 
Paris, 1877 sqq. 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 107 

the psychological novel ; by Crdbillon fils and Eestif 
de la Bretonne in the tale ; by Du Laurens, De la 
Mettrie, and Diderot in the Shandyesque romance ; 
while Marivaux furnished delightfully amusing trifles, 
Florian, the gentle officer of dragoons, and Marmontel, 
the mild pupil of Voltaire, provided didactic sugar- 
pills, and the Abb£ Barth^lemy offered a huge bolus of 
the same tempting character in the six stout volumes 
of the " Travels of the Young Anach arsis, " which 
marks a revival of a popular interest in antiquity 
that is illustrated also by the poetry of Chdnier. And 
then, with a place quite unique among the novelists of 
the world, is Eousseau, the prophet of the new era, of 
sentiment and Nature. 

Le Sage, though he was no mean dramatist, was 
much greater as a realistic and satirical novelist, and 
was, indeed, the first French writer of fiction who 
lived, or could have lived, by his pen. Like Vol- 
taire, he was a scholar of the Jesuits, and educated for 
the law ; but while Voltaire drew his inspiration from 
England, Le Sage turned rather to Spain. The title 
and idea of " Le Diable boiteux, " his first independent 
essay (1707), was borrowed from Guevara, though the 
work itself — in Scott's opinion, one of the profoundest 
studies of human character — owed more to La Bruyfere. 
But he is less remembered to-day for this than for the 
equally keen and more entertaining " Gil Bias " (1715- 
1735), — a book singular in that it seems to belong 
rather to either of two foreign literatures than to its 
own. For while it has been recognized as a masterpiece 
in France, it had no roots in the past of French litera- 
ture ; and its form was so closely studied from the Span- 
ish novelet picaresca, that over-zealous Castilians have 
actually claimed it as a translation. And as it had no 



108 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

ancestry in France, so it had no immediate posterity 
there, but rather in England, in the work of Defoe and 
Smollett, though Le Sage anticipated many features of 
the novel of low life and the naturalism of the school 
of Balzac. 

In his style, Le Sage set himself against what he 
called the " strained diction " and " charms more bril- 
liant than solid " of Marivaux. He wished to be clear, 
and, above all, not to be affected ; and he moulded to 
his use a language very direct, terse, somewhat theat- 
rical, but yet truly popular. If " Gil Bias, " as a 
novel, seems at times prolix, it is because Le Sage, 
like a novelistic La Bruyfere, is not content to show a 
segment of society, but seeks in the varying fortunes 
of his hero to reveal all its faults and foibles. But he 
shuns, especially in the admirable third part (1734), 
the exceptional, and deals with life as he knows it, 
and with average men, differing thus from some mod- 
ern realists and from his own later work. For there 
is in this school always a tendency to dwell on the 
picturesque side of vagabond life, and to study the 
abnormal in vice rather than in virtue. Le Sage, in- 
deed, has no touch of the pessimism that pervades the 
modern Naturalists. Acquaintance with vice is but 
a factor in bringing Gil to virtue. But in his closer 
adaptations from the Spanish, " Guzman d'Alfarache " 
(1732) and the " Bachelier de Salamanque " (1736), 
there is hardly any expression of moral sympathy at 
all, —-a fact much more interesting than the novels 
themselves ; for it is the first sign of that weariness of 
conscience and moral apathy that was presently to 
reveal itself in Voltaire's " Pucelle, " in Diderot's 
" Neveu de Bameau, " and in the work of the later 
philosophers. By this almost alone can Le Sage 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 109 

be connected with the fiction of his century in 
France. 

For the growth of the novel was rather on psycho- 
logical lines. Marivaux (1688-1763), without being 
either a realist or a moralist, showed, in his " Specta- 
teur, " that he was a very keen analyst of human feel- 
ing ; and the qualities of these essays appear also in his 
best novels, — " Marianne " and " Le Paysan parvenu. " 
The former is a delicate dissection of coquetry ; the 
latter traces the development of self-assurance and 
effrontery in M. Jacob, the successful and universal 
lover, who represents a sort of arrested development 
of Maupassant's " Bel-Ami," though oftener compared 
with Molikre's " Don Juan " and George Sand's " Leone 
Leoni. " In both novels, however, there are carefully 
drawn pictures of contemporary society, and some 
scenes of Parisian street life, that suggest the realistic 
vigor of Balzac. Still, it is the psychological study 
that absorbs Marivaux's interest and his reader's also. 
No writer kills off or abandons his characters with 
more nonchalance when they begin to embarrass him ; 
but, even so, he has brought neither of these stories to 
•an end. In him first we notice that pre-eminence is 
given to women, and also the curious concomitance of 
facile shamelessness with a romantic and sublimated 
conventional sentimentality, — a note that runs through 
all the fiction of the century, reaching its height in 
Eousseau; a double-twisted thread that seldom fails 
to show itself both in the loftiest and in the basest of 
its writers. 

This peculiar sentimental strain was taken up with 
much skill and some mixture of romantic idealism in 
Provost's " Manon Lescaut " (1731), admirable in a 
rather nauseating kind. In a style whose simple 



110 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

directness is the highest art, he tells a story in 
which one knows not whether to wonder most at the 
complacent love of the hero, who is ever ready to 
pardon venal infidelity, or at the deathless love of the 
frail heroine, who can resist all seductions but those 
of good wine and good clothes. As an analysis of 
sentimentalism degenerating to the verge of drivelling 
inanity, the book holds an eminence that may long be 
unrivalled. Still it must be admitted that both in 
:t Manon " and in his now forgotten " Cleveland, " as 
well as by his translations of Eichardson, Prdvost 
did much to illustrate the resources and direct the 
growth of romantic fiction. 

Yet though " Manon " had many successors, it had 
no memorable ones in the early part of the century. 
Indeed, its closest counterpart in the intertwining of 
sentiment and lubricity, Louvet's " Faublas, " dates 
from 1786. More closely resembling Marivaux, but- 
without his depth, are the stories of society written for 
the amusement of an idle and corrupt aristocracy by 
Cr^billon fils, son of the dramatist, and by the equally 
immoral but more delicate La Clos, whose " Liaisons 
dangereuses " is the best in this inferior kind. From 
amusement to instruction is not a long step ; but the 
didactic fiction of this period, though voluminous, is 
not of striking excellence. It may suffice to name 
the " gutter-Eousseau, " Eestif de la Bretonne, that 
" genial animal " who is quite unrivalled in the serious 
pedagogy of his obscene sentimentality; and at the 
other extreme, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, in whose 
didactic idyls, " Paul and Virginia " and " La Chau- 
mifere indienne, " sentiment reaches the acute stage of 
hyperaesthesia, and the ethics, like Shakspere's med- 
lars, are " rotten before they are ripe. " Bernardin, 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUKY. Ill 

however, by his treatment of landscape as " the back- 
ground of the picture of a human life," is epoch- 
making in the history of the novel. His shallow 
sentiment reflects the growing weariness with wit and 
social artificiality, and was for a time immensely 
popular; but it was the natural result of Kousseau's 
teaching, and that will claim attention presently. 

Meantime a new turn had been given to fiction by 
Voltaire, — here, as usual, a leader. He took up the 
conte where Perrault and his followers had left it, and 
developed from it the tendenz roman, the novel with 
a social or ethical purpose. His short tales are the 
most artful and insinuating controversial pamphlets 
that were ever penned. Self-satisfied optimism in 
religion and popular thought were never so pitilessly 
laid bare, so wittily mocked, as in " Candide " (1759) ; 
political and ecclesiastical reforms were never more 
effectually preached than in the " Homme aux qua- 
rante dcus " (1768), with its amusing persiflage of the 
" single tax ; " the presumption of an unspiritual es- 
tablished church might laugh at direct attacks, but 
winced at the scornful masked satire of " Zadig " 
(1747). No man has done so much in a bad cause 
with so slight weapons as Voltaire, by the indirect, 
gliding irony of his allusions to the Scriptures. " I 
will not moralize and will be read," said Byron; but 
Voltaire moralized more convincingly than any of his 
time, and was more universally read also. It is true 
that here, as elsewhere, he is not consistent. Perhaps 
he was not anxious to be. " I begin to care more for 
happiness in life than for a truth, " he said. Intellec- 
tually, he might be a pessimist and determinist ; but 
he knew that " the good of society demands that man 
shall think himself free, " and he acted and preached 



,112 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

accordingly, — for instance in " Le Mondain " (1736) 
and " L'Histoire de Jenni * (1775). In this he is 
a utilitarian rather than a philosopher. He knows 
that the mass of readers will not see his inconsistency, 
while they will feel his keen thrusts at old abuses and 
creeds, and their pride will be flattered by the frank 
cynicism which urges them to combine with the writer 
to draw advantage from the superstitions of the less 
enlightened. Perhaps no " moralist " is at once so 
clear and so self-contradictory as Voltaire in these 
tales, where he seems now deist, now atheist, now 
radical, now reactionary, now pessimist, now optimist, 
so that the work as a whole becomes indeed " a chaos 
of luminous ideas. " 

The novel with a purpose, thus launched, found a 
placid cultivator in Marmontel and an eager advocate 
in Diderot, more consistent in design than Voltaire, 
but less even in execution ; rising sometimes to a 
serious and eloquent indignation, as in " La Eeli- 
gieuse, " then descending into the pig-sty of " Les 
Bijoux indiscrets, " or loosing the bridle of a Shandy- 
esque fancy in " Jacques le fataliste " and the " Neveu 
de Eameau, " that so fascinated the attention of Goethe ; 
or perhaps revelling in the free-lovers' utopia of the 
" Supplement au voyage de Bourgainville. " Asa 
modern critic, Faguet has observed, Diderot was a type 
of the French bourgeois, and very far from " the most 
German head in France, " as it has been the fashion to 
call him. 1 He had the same facile morality, the same 
lack of delicacy, the same vulgar inclinations and 
generous emotions, the same sincerity and industry 
that stamp the French middle class, which was now 

1 The expression is Sainte-Beuve's. Goethe had said : " In all that 
the French blame in him, he is a genuine German." 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 113 

first coming to the front as representative of national 
life. It is in his novels that Diderot shows most of 
this fundamentally Gallic mind. While his philoso- 
phy was a prelude to the theory of evolution, in his 
fiction he anticipated Eousseau 's " state of nature ; " and 
his cynicism did not shrink from the uttermost conse- 
quences of his theory, more consistent in this than his 
sentimental successor, who had arrived at similar con- 
clusions by an independent and less logical process. 
Yet the " state of nature " is associated rather with 
Eousseau than with Diderot, for he preached it with a 
fire of sympathetic enthusiasm that made him teacher 
and guide of Europe for many years in a deeper sense 
than Voltaire had ever been, though literary criticism 
must rank him as the inferior genius. 

Jean-Jacques Eousseau (1712-1778) was the son of 
a Genevan clockmaker ; yet up to his fortieth year he 
had no settled home or occupation, but led the wan- 
dering life of a sentimental Gil Bias, the shuttlecock 
of his usually generous emotions. For he had a good 
heart, ready to open to all, but as ready to take offence, 
and quick to think itself deceived. No man ever 
quarrelled so consistently with every one who tried to 
befriend him, — with Voltaire, Diderot, Hume, the 
Prince of Conti, and the various lady patronesses of his 
wanderings. He came at last to a hatred, not of the 
individual, but of society, which, it seemed to him, 
had corrupted the individual, and made him unworthy 
of the loving trust Eousseau longed to give. It is not 
the faults of human nature that grieve him, but the 
faults of social order against which his sensitive nature 
chafes. It is in literature, as in society, the revolt of 
individualism against the classicism of Boileau and 
the principles of the Bourbon monarchy. So his life 



\114 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

becomes a vision of what might be ; a Utopian imagi^ 
nation colors all his philosophy. It addresses itself, 
not to reason, but to sentiment. It is not the white 
light of ideas, but the glow of passionate tires. Evi- 
dence is neglected, probability scorned. The " Social 
Contract * assumes an origin of society that not only 
never was, but, a 'priori, never could be. The peda- 
gogy of " Emile, " though most valuable and sugges- 
tive, is just as impracticable and visionary. The 
" Nouvelle H^loise " moves in a cloud-land of emas- 
culate unreality; while the cynical frankness of 
his " Confessions " shows how his character was dis- 
integrated by unresisted imagination, and explains 
his " misanthropic optimism " by his pathological 
condition. 

Dissatisfaction with the order of society was almost 
universal during the latter half of the century, but, ex- 
cept in philosophic circles, it was inarticulate and 
dimly realized. Eousseau made it a popular passion, a 
universal enthusiasm. But the destructive influence 
of " In^galite " (1755) far outweighed the constructive 
effort of the " Contrat social " (1762), which offered 
no practical remedy and, indeed, stands quite isolated 
in his writings; for it borrowed elements from Locke's 
second Essay on Government that the author hardly 
assimilated or understood, — elements that were incon- 
sistent with that fundamental dogma of the " state of 
nature " which runs through all his later work, inspir- 
ing his " Lettre sur les spectacles * (1758) with the 
spirit of a modern Tertullian, and dictating the aris- 
tocratic pedagogy of " Emile " (1762). 

Rousseau's theory in " Emile " is that a child 
should be left to develop naturally. He allows a tutor, 
but only to satisfy legitimate curiosity and arrange 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 115 

external influence, so as to give " a positive indirect 
education. " Even the ethics of property are to be 
taught by object lessons. He wishes the intellect sub- 
ordinated to the sentimental affections and emotions, 
but he wishes the child to be isolated from other chil- 
dren, from adults, even from his family, since all these 
have some of the inherited virus of society. Goethe 
called " Emile " the " natural gospel of education ; " 
and in so far as the object of all teaching is to produce 
independent thinking, to teach children and not facts, 
Eousseau proclaimed a truth always in danger of being 
forgotten. He was the reforming iconoclast in this 
field that Voltaire and Diderot were in others. He 
went too far. Taken literally, his " intuitive educa- 
tion " was a paradox ; but it was a most helpful one, 
most timely, and most fruitful, not in France alone, 
but for all Europe. 

In the letters of " Julie, la nouvelle H^loi'se " 
(1761), that " Midsummer Night's Dream of a pri- 
vate tutor, " that often suggests Goethe's "Elective 
Affinities," we have Eousseau's ideas on love, and 
naturally, therefore, his most popular work, perhaps 
the most influential novel that was ever written. 
Here he put most heart and passion, and most of his 
morbid personal experience. To be sure, Eichardson 
was his obvious, almost his declared model. 1 From 
him he took the epistolary form, the bourgeois char- 
acters, the prolix digressions, and it was from the 
England that his fancy saw behind Eichardson that 
he drew Milord Edouard, the philosophic prig, and 
those astonishing " English mornings, " where people 
gathered together in gardens that art had aided nature 

1 See Texte, Rousseau et les origines du cosmopolitauisme lit- 
te'raire. 



116 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

to turn into nurseries of sentimentality, and there " en- 
joyed at once the bliss of being united and the charm 
of meditation " in " an immobility of ecstasy. " 

But what made the " H^loise " a power was its feeling 
for Nature and its spirit of lyric melancholy. Here, 
too, Eousseau had had predecessors, — Thomson, Gray, 
Collins, Young, and the other sources of Ossian, — but 
these " common people of the skies " paled before a 
passion where recollections of Mademoiselle de Galley 
and Mademoiselle de Graffenried were fanned to new 
flame by the presence of Madame d'Houdetot, and inter- 
penetrated with memories of Madame de Warens, till 
all became a haunting reality, to which the author 
sought to lend a central purpose and dignity by a de- 
fence of the home and of Christianity against his fan- 
cied enemies, the philosophes and Ubertins. 

It is true that the situation he creates is hopelessly 
artificial. These connoisseurs of rare sentiments and 
mutual students of their own pathological psychology, 
these romantic self-tormentors, are so false to Nature 
that Eousseau can neither procure a normal climax nor 
suffer his characters to get on without one, but is com- 
pelled to summon a deus ex machina to cut the tangle 
in which their perverse sentimentality had involved 
these paradoxical people in their " enterprise against 
common-sense. " That there were such men as Saint- 
Preux in this generation, no one with Werther before 
his eyes will deny ; but it was the women of the novel, 
Julie and Claire, that won the book its most passionate 
admirers and its immense vogue among ladies, who 
felt that their duplex feminine nature, neglected by 
previous novelists, had been seized as never before. 
They were flattered by the eminence to which Eous- 
seau had advanced them, and charmed by the sym- 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 117 

pathy that throbbed through his pages. They knew 
the reality of the acre baiser that so amused Voltaire. 
Indeed, Eousseau's women had a more defined individ- 
uality than French fiction had yet seen. In general, 
the book was genuine and sincere. It came from a 
romantic heart, and spoke to thousands of romantic 
hearts, who also had in rich measure the " gift of tears, " 
in which Julie so readily dissolved. It roused in 
them that " general warmth " of which Jean Paul 
speaks, — that vague, all-embracing, ill-defined, sen- 
timental philanthropy, which was a cause, and, still 
more, a directing force in the French Eevolution. 

u Emile " and " Julie " show sentimentality applied. 
The " Confessions " exhibit it as raw material. Here 
one is less repelled by the dogmatic undercurrent, 
and so can enjoy more fully the artistic charm of the 
apparently frank and simple narrative of his frailty 
and his vices, where attention is suspended with great 
art, events skilfully prepared, and each climax most 
carefully managed. These " Confessions " are probably 
most read to-day ; but in the influence they exerted they 
must yield both to the novels and to " The Savoyard 
Vicar," a little tractate contained in " Emile," whose 
emotional, undogmatic, yet fervent faith is the first 
effectual stemming of the infidel current, and the 
herald of the equally emotional Christianity of Saint- 
Pierre, Chateaubriand, and Lamartine, as Eousseau's 
feeling for Nature was for that which was most original 
in their art. 

For in all Eousseau's works there is a love of 
Nature, a sense of and appreciation for natural beauty, 
that was a revelation in French literature. Not only 
is there nothing before Eousseau equal to the sunrise 
in the third book of " Emile, " or to his description 



118 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

of the pervenche, but there is nothing to which it can 
be compared. He gave his countrymen a new sense. 
This was much ; but far more important was Kousseau's 
assertion of the long-suppressed rights of individual- 
ism, of the ego in literature. As a describer of senti- 
ments and feelings, he surpassed Provost, as Provost 
had surpassed Marivaux. Now, this is just the line of 
demarcation that separates the classical literature from 
the romantic. Sentimental religion and sentimental 
politics may be discredited by the logic of events, the 
recent literary movement may show in its naturalism 
more of the spirit of Diderot; but individualism, de- 
scriptions of sentiment and nature, and the mutual 
play of one on the other, are still the key-note of 
modern literature. That Eousseau struck that note, 
that he " emancipated the ego, " gives him a unique 
place, and makes his name the most fitting introduc- 
tion to the literature of the nineteenth century. 






MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBRIAND. 119 



CHAPTEE IV. 

MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBRIAND. 

The early years of the nineteenth century were unfa- 
vorable to the literary development of France. The 
Napoleonic era did indeed nurse the childhood of 
many whose illustrious genius bears witness to the 
emotions that attended their birth, but these emotions 
found no immediate and worthy echo. Napoleon 
might desire to add this to his other laurels ; but the 
compeller of states could not command the flight of 
genius, and the lassitude of reaction from the unbridled 
liberties of the Eevolution invited a tyranny that soon 
spread from the political to the social and literary 
sphere. Yet, during the twenty years that separate 
Lodi from Waterloo, two writers were in their prime 
whose work contains the germ of nearly every later 
phase of literary development in the last century. 
Madame de Stael and Chateaubriand are the true 
antetypes of the Romanticists, the Psychologists, and 
the Eealists, and of the subjective and objective 
schools of criticism. And they are to such an extent 
the sufficient complements and supplements of one 
another, that their contemporaries for the first twenty 
years of the century need hardly be named in a 
study of the literary currents of the eighty years that 
follow. 

Madame de Stael' s influence on literature cannot be 
measured by the popularity of her books. It is long 



120 MODERN FKENCH LITERATURE. 

since any of her writings have been widely read, and 
they are never likely to be so. Yet there has been no 
generation since her time that has not felt and ac- 
knowledged the power of her fruitful thought, not in 
politics alone, but in literature also. 

Her personality need not long detain us. She was 
the daughter of Suzanne Curchod, Gibbon's youthful 
flame, and of the Genevese banker, Necker, the noted 
finance minister of Louis XVI. 1 Thus it happened 
that she passed her precocious youth in one of the most 
brilliant literary salons of Paris, where her lively 
intellect was stimulated, perhaps as much as her 
vanity, by constant intercourse with some of the 
keenest wits and critics of that time. Hither came 
Grimm, author of the " Correspondence with Foreign 
Courts ; " here might be seen Eaynal, of the philo- 
sophic and demagogic " History of the Indies ; " here, 
too, the distinguished metaphysicians Thomas and 
Marmontel. And here the future Madame de Stael 
used to sit at her mother's feet, and absorb the 
substance of the debates and discussions around her, 
storing up silently, like a busy bee, material for the 
inexhaustible conversations and stinging criticisms of 
a lifetime, while she nursed ambitions of a future in- 
tellectual domination over a social circle as brilliant as 
that which the genius of her parents had gathered. 

Perhaps no girl of fifteen ever lived in the midst of 

i She was born in 1765, and died in 1817. Principal works : De la 
literature, 1800; Delphine, 1802; Corinne, 1807; De l'Allemagne, 
1 813 ; Revolution francaise, 1818 ; Dix annees d'exil, 1821. Biography : 
Blennerhasset, Life of Madame de Stael; Sorel, Madame de Stael 
(Grands ecrivains francais). Critical essays : Brunetiere, Evolution de 
la critique (Lecon VI.) ; Faguet, Politiques et moralistes, i. 123; Pel- 
lissier, Mouvement litteraire au xix. siecle, p. 42 sqq. (cited hereafter as 
"Pellissier"). 



MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBRIAND. 121 

such a vortex of disintegrating ideas, and held the 
little skiff of her genius steady in the tide. In any 
case, Madame de Stael became so permeated with the 
ruling ideas of her time that she took into herself, and 
assimilated more perfectly, perhaps, than any other 
one person, the intellectual spirit of that age ; and to 
the close of her life it is this, the last generation of 
the eighteenth century, that she represents, with its 
philosophy of progressive confident optimism and its 
belief in ideas and ideals. But Mademoiselle Necker's 
intellectual emancipation did not hinder her from a 
marriage (January, 1786), dictated far more by con- 
venience than love, with the Swedish ambassador, 
Baron von Stael-Holstein. Perhaps it was felt that 
she was not likely to make a love-match. Boisterous 
and vain in her girlhood, plain to the verge of home- 
liness from infancy to death, she was so fond of talk- 
ing that a lover might have found it hard to declare 
his passion. 2 Even before her marriage, she had grown 
to be positive and self-assertive, and had written 
much, though she had published nothing. So, though 
she had three children, she kept the tenor of her inde- 
pendent way, and at length (1799) consented to such 
separation as the law then admitted. Neither husband 
nor wife cared at all for each other, and neither cared 

1 Sorel gives us this word-picture : " Expressive features, a com- 
plexion dark rather than fresh, yet colored and growing animate in 
conversation, sculpturesque shoulders, powerful arms, robust hands, as 
of a sovereign rather than of a great sentimental coquette, a high 
forehead, black hair falling in thick curls, vigorous nose, strongly 
marked mouth, prominent lips opened wide to life and speech, an ora- 
tor's mouth with a frank, good-humored smile. All the genius shining 
in her eyes, in her sparkling glances, confident, proud, deep, and gentle 
in repose, imperious when a flash crosses them. But that that flash 
may shine, she needs the tripod and inspiration, — she must speak to 
seduce and conquer, to make herself beloved " (pp. 18-19). 



122 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

that the other did not care. Though the Baron did 
not die till 1802, he played no part in her intellectual 
life. 

The literary career of Madame de Stael begins with 
" Lettres sur J. -J. Eousseau " (1788), for whose social 
ideas she had then an ardent admiration, though she 
was too persistently optimistic wholly to compre- 
hend them. Other literary inspiration had come 
to her girlhood from " Clarissa Harlowe " and from 
" Werther. " Hence she sympathized with the Kevo- 
lution till the imprisonment of the king produced a 
revulsion to an equally indiscreet " incivism. " So 
she came to abuse her ambassadorial right of asylum ; 
and fear of the consequences of this rashness led her 
to leave Paris shortly before the September massacres 
(1792), though it is not clear that she was in danger 
from anything but her overheated imagination. 

She went to Coppet, near Geneva, and gathered there 
a coterie of friends and political sympathizers. Still, 
she did not attract the attention she thought her due ; 
so in the next year she turned to England, and tried 
to make herself the centre of a more important group, 
though not without some personal scandal. But Paris 
always fascinated her; and when the fall of Eobe- 
spierre (1794) permitted, she returned, and for nine 
years, interrupted only by brief visits to Coppet, she 
played a political part, though not so great a one as 
she imagined. Instinct led her to oppose Napoleon, 
and her vanity was soothed at the thought that she 
could irritate one who had sneered at her genius. 
Her separation had deprived her of diplomatic protec- 
tion in 1799 ; but she continued to tease the Corsican 
with biting words, knowing that he could only exile 
her, and that nothing could give her so excellent a 



MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBRIAND. 123 

vantage-ground from which to shoot her poisoned 
shafts of wit and nurse the pride of martyrdom. 

In 1803 the expected order from the consular police 
banished her from Paris, and naturally directed her 
attention to Germany, which, as Eichter had said, 
then " ruled the kingdom of the air, " the land of 
ideas ; and so, unwearied in her search for noted people 
to talk to, she came that winter to Weimar, where her 
fame as a conversationalist had preceded her. Goethe 
opportunely discovered that his health did not permit 
him to see strangers. He put her off on Schiller, a 
good deal to the latter's disgust; for though he found 
her w r itty and keen, she seemed to him to have little 
ideality or poetry and no feminine reserve. Her flow 
of words overwhelmed him, and when she left Weimar, 
" he felt, " so he wrote to Goethe, " as though he had 
recovered from a severe illness. " However, she pro- 
duced a quite different impression on that rather eccen- 
tric prophet of German Eomanticism, Wilhelm 
Schlegel, who became first a kind of literary impre- 
sario for her conversazione, then a private tutor and 
secretary, and an almost constant member of her 
household till her death. It is important to bear this 
in mind, for a large part of her mission was to intro- 
duce German ideas to France; and it was through 
Schlegel's eyes, critical indeed, but far from impar- 
tial, that she saw both the land and its literature and 
philosophy. Her book on Germany has suffered in 
consequence, as will appear presently. 

Before Madame de Stael's ambition had been 
crowned by exile, she had written an essay of minor 
value on " The Influence of the Passions " (1796), and 
a more ambitious treatise on " Literature in its Con- 
nection with Social Institutions " (1800), that shows 



124 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

the marks of her close association with the politi- 
cal philosopher Constant, best known for his novel 
" Adolphe, " a forerunner of the modern psychologi- 
cal fiction. But her real power was first seen in 
" Delphine " (1802), a half -autobiographical story, 
that naturally deals with the unsounded mysteries 
of the misunderstood woman, the femme incomprise. 
But " Delphine " is hardly read now, and would be read 
still less, were it not for her second novel * Corinne " 
(1807), a story for which the travels that followed her 
exile furnished rich material. Here first in France the 
novel was made a vehicle for artistic discussion, as she 
found it already employed in Germany by Goethe and 
Eichter. 

In 1808 she broke finally with Constant, with whom 
association had brought her neither credit nor satisfac- 
tion; and during the years 1809 and 1810, with in- 
creasing religious seriousness, she refreshed her memo- 
ries of Germany by extended travels there, and used 
the materials that she gathered then and before in her 
most important book, " De l'Allemagne. " This she 
saw fit to publish in Paris, and, for fear that she might 
be allowed to do so uncensured, she took the occasion 
to write an exasperating letter to Napoleon, who was 
stung into confiscating the whole printed edition of a 
book his own censors had endorsed. The loss fell on 
her publisher, and, having secured the advertisement 
of this inexpensive martyrdom, and made Napoleon a 
little ridiculous by a second and more stringent decree 
of exile, she consoled herself at Coppet with a Swiss 
officer, Bocca, whom she secretly married in 1811, she 
being then forty-five years old and he twenty-two. 
Then she travelled for two years in Bussia, Sweden, 
and England, where at length her " Germany " ap- 



MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBRIAND. 125 

peared in 1813. Napoleon's fall now opened France 
to her again ; but she remained much abroad, for her 
health was gradually failing, and her last book, the 
* Considerations on the French Kevolution, " was not 
what she would have made it ten years before. She 
died July 14, 1817. 

The impression that Madame de Stael's personality 
made on her contemporaries was not attractive. 
Coquetry is pardoned only to beauty and youth. She 
was never beautiful, and she had long ceased to be 
young, while she still continued to urge her presence 
and her conversation on men of genius, who, like 
Schiller, found it more exhausting than admirable. 
Then, when well past forty, she made herself ridicu- 
lously happy by an absurd marriage. She was not per- 
sonally liked, even by those who appreciated her 
talents ; nor was she a great writer, if one considers 
only her language and style. It is not for either of 
these that she takes the large place that literary tradi- 
tion accords her ; it is the contents of her work that 
has lasting influence and value, though in important 
particulars even this was not original with her. In- 
deed, one of the most striking things about her is her 
inquisitive receptivity. She was always on the alert 
to learn from everybody, at the risk, or even with the 
certainty, of boring them. But this made her books a 
remarkable reflection of the world of thought in which 
she moved. 

The daughter of Necker could hardly fail to be in- 
spired with an indestructible faith in human reason, 
liberty, and justice. Madame de Stael abandoned 
herself with her whole soul to the militant optimism 
of the eighteenth century. She conceived herself a 
prophetess of the religion of humanity ; she believed 



126 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

thoroughly in human perfectibility, and thought " the 
hope of the future progress of our species the most- 
religious hope on earth. " Virtue and happiness were 
her twin enthusiasms, but which held the key to the 
other she never clearly saw. Her genius would have 
placed, with her father, happiness in virtue ; her ima- 
gination, with Eousseau, placed virtue in happiness. 1 
Her first considerable book, the " Literature, " showed 
" a European spirit in a French mind. " It was an 
act of faith in the destinies of the nineteenth century 
based on the out-worn philosophy of the eighteenth. 
Even the reign of terror could not shake her placid 
confidence that all was for the best in the best of 
worlds. " How reason and philosophy constantly 
acquire new force through the numberless misfortunes 
of mankind, " is her reflection, consoling or exasper- 
ating as these misfortunes of mankind happen to be 
ours or our neighbors'. With happy foresight she 
applied this thought to literature, into which she saw 
that the democratic spirit would bring a more ener- 
getic beauty, a more moving and more philosophic 
picture of the events of life. Thus she felt it would 
" enlarge the bounds of art ; " and if that rendered the 
drama of Eacine impossible, she, at least, shed no 
tears at the thought. 

In this way Madame de Stael helped to liberate 
French literature from itself and from the self-imposed 
fetters of absolute critical canons. But she was also 
first to widen her literary ideas by contrasting and com- 
paring them with those of contemporary Germany and 
England, till then much neglected, especially the 
German, by those who proclaimed their natural pre- 
scriptive right to enlighten the world. Her friend- 
1 See Sorel, op. cit. p. 17. 



MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBRIAND. 127 

ships were studiously cosmopolitan. " From now on, " 
she said, " we must have a European spirit. " She 
was first to practise what she preached, and she had 
before her a people sorely in need of the lesson, though 
prepared for it also, as never before, by the attrition 
of the Napoleonic wars. No one has described her 
purpose better than herself. " The sterility with 
which our literature is menaced, " she says, " suggests 
that the French spirit needs to be regenerated by some 
more vigorous sap ; " and this she would bring to 
her country from beyond the Ehine. For while the 
French literature, as well as the Italian and Spanish, 
from which, till then, it had chiefly drawn, were in 
the main and in their spirit artistic and rationalistic, 
often even plastic in form and hedonistic in charac- 
ter, the Teutonic literatures, being less dominated 
by classical traditions, were more idealistic and indi- 
vidually subjective. Hence English and German — ■ 
Ossian, Byron, Goethe, Eichter, and the Schlegels — 
aided powerfully in the reawakening of egoism that 
had been begun by Eousseau. That reawakening had 
been the aim of the " Literature, " and was the result 
of the " Germany. " The French Eomantic movement, 
one of the great literary regenerations in history, is in 
large measure the work of Madame de Stael. 

But this very success is the cause of the neglect 
into which her works have fallen. She occupied her- 
self much with the thought, with the ethical content 
of what she wrote, little with its form. But the 
thoughts that were new or revolutionary when she 
uttered them, became commonplaces the more quickly 
because they found general acceptance. Thus her 
work appealed to after generations neither by novelty 
nor by beauty ; and so it has found ever fewer readers, 



128 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

though it surpassed in breadth and fulness that of any 
contemporary author. She is still the only female 
writer of France whose talent is truly masculine. 
Almost every literary movement of the century can 
be traced back to her initiative. " She sowed the cen- 
tury with fertile ideas ; she gave French poetry, as it 
were, a new soul. " 2 

The books by which she did this are pre-eminently 
" Corinne " and " De l'Allemagne. " The former shows 
the creative artist at the height of her development. 
It is " the imaginative work of a very sensitive woman, 
shrewd, a good moralist, and very deft in the manage- 
ment of intrigue. But her imagination deals only 
with ideas. She has an inventive, not a creative 
genius; she knows how to paint only herself. Take 
away Corinne, and there is not a living character in 
the story;" 2 and the most prominent are the most 
unreal. Her lovers are absolutely conventional ; not 
studies of life, but visions from the dreamland of her 
fancy. Nor was this thought a fault by readers only 
a generation removed from the " Sorrows of Werther, " 
who were still breathing the idealist atmosphere of 
the eighteenth century. This will explain why 
"Corinne/' like Goethe's greater novel, should have 
a tragic catastrophe. The actual world will always 
present this aspect to the idealist, who, like Madame 
de Stael, spends his life in the chase of the butterfly, 
happiness, and has always an instinctive feeling that 
intellectual superiority is rather a hardship than a 
boon, or, in her own words, that " glory is only the 
bright shroud of happiness. " 

1 Pellissier, Mouvement litteraire. See also Brunetiere, Evolution 
de la critique. 

2 Faguet, Politiques et moralistes. 



MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBRIAND. 129 

In " Corinne, " as in " Delphine, " the plot is easy, 
graceful, well-managed, but not strong, nor of any 
great psychological value. Her actors are less studies 
fiom life than characters in La Bruykre's style; and 
even so, they are rather typical phases of the author's 
own character. Her personality is ever present and 
overshadowing to the reader, as it probably was to the 
writer. But, as has been said, this was a personality 
with which it is difficult to feel much sympathy, and 
difficult not to feel some impatience. The chief value 
of " Corinne, " then, is not psychologic, but ethical and 
aesthetic. Bousseau had preached the purifying influ- 
ence of a return to Nature. Chateaubriand was even 
then urging, with all the power of his splendid 
eloquence, a return to the ages of faith and the sympa- 
thetic study of mediaeval Christianity. Essential as 
a balance and complement to their teaching was 
Madame de Stael's education of the aesthetic sense, 
by which a new range of emotions gained recognition 
in the ethical evolution of literature. " For a whole 
generous, romantic, and passionate generation ' Co- 
rinne ' was the book of love and of the ideal. " It is 
in this novel that the artistic and musical fiction of 
the next period had its immediate origin. Without 
" Corinne " there would have been no " Teverino " and 
no " Consuelo. " 

" Germany " followed up and developed the ideas of 
the " Literature " as " Corinne " had done those of 
" Delphine. " But it .had a far deeper effect and wider 
influence. For with all her unswerving sympathy with 
the eighteenth century, there was a side of Madame 
de Stael's mind that was first developed by contact 
with German thought, a side that otherwise might 
never have been developed at all. The ideas thus 

9 



130 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

evoked were so new to France that their promulgates 
received greater credit for originality than was her due. 
But whether her ideas were original or not is a matter 
of far less importance than that through her German 
Romanticism and subjectivity found a more rapid and 
less distorted acceptance in France than would other- 
wise have been possible ; and thus Madame de Stael 
not only influenced the development of French polit- 
ical and philosophic speculation, but she gave "the 
key of the fields " to the lyric muse of France that had 
pined for lack of liberty since Malherbe had " brought 
her to the rules of duty ; " she was the emancipator of 
the Romantic School. 

" De l'Allemagne " is a book of criticism, but it is 
not a critical book. With one eye on Germany, she 
has the other fixed on France, always intent on the 
moral of her fable, best pleased if it can be barbed 
with a sting for the Corsican and his policy. So the 
comparison of this book to Tacitus' " Germania " is 
trite and obvious. But the likeness hardly extends be- 
yond the purpose and the title. She had seen much of 
Germany ; but Schlegel was always at her elbow, and 
the daughter of the Swiss Protestant had found herself 
more drawn to the hazy idealism of the German meta- 
physicians than to the truer spirit of the School of 
Weimar. It is not of Germany nor of the Germans 
that this book treats primarily or chiefly, and in the 
part nominally devoted to that country and its people 
there is least observation and most error. Philosophy 
and art absorb almost her entire interest. Her naive 
idealism found in the nebulous metaphysics of Kant 
and Fichte an antidote for the cold, dry, and not very 
penetrating light of the French Encyclopaedists. Her 
generous enthusiasm had been repelled by D'Holbach 



MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBEIAND. 131 

and Diderot. It was drawn easily, or rather it cast 
itself with delight, into the vortex of Kant and Jacobi, 
into a deep but adventurous and audacious idealism 
that was prone to see things through ideas and to dis- 
solve facts into thoughts. In this philosophy she saw 
her very self, her own sentiments and instincts, but 
conceived and expressed in a way that transcended her 
power to originate, or indeed wholly to comprehend 
and transmit. Then, too, as Heine has shown, this 
system was the natural result of the Protestant posi- 
tion, so that on this side also it appealed to Madame 
de Stael, who evolved from it a sort of liberal Chris- 
tianity, vague and ill-defined, and as far removed from 
the national Christianity of France as German meta- 
physics from French philosophy. Thus she contrib- 
uted to widen and liberalize, though hardly to 
strengthen and deepen, the philosophic and religious 
thought of the next generation in France. 

But in 1804 Madame de Stael found in Germany a 
literature as sharply contrasted as its philosophy to 
that of France. Emancipated by Lessing and the 
vagaries of the i( Storm and Stress" from foreign influ- 
ences, and bonds, it was in the full bloom of its second 
classical period, while it was already clear that French 
classicism, rejected abroad, was moribund at home. 
Not only did the Germans allow themselves a more 
unrestrained subjectivity and a greater freedom both 
in matter and form, but there were among them two or 
three men of greater poetic genius than any France 
had seen since Molikre's day. Naturally these liber- 
ties impressed her ; she was no longer sure that the 
eighteenth century in France marked a literary advance 
on the seventeenth. Her theory of the drama, once 
narrowly French, now became broadly Aristotelian; 



132 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

and even the Encyclopaedist philosophy seemed now 
to her to have been clouded by combat, while the soli- 
taries of the seventeenth century had had " a more pro- 
found insight into the depths of the human heart. " 

What, then, was her conclusion, her advice to French 
authors ? She would have them imitate neither their 
own classics nor the new German stars, for she per- 
ceived, and was one of the first to grasp, the truth, that 
literature, to gain a hold on any people, must speak 
in the spirit, temper, and language of the time, not in 
a pseudo-classical jargon. " The literature of the 
ancients is among the moderns a transplanted litera- 
ture. The romantic, chivalrous literature is indigenous 
among us ; it is our religion, our institutions, that have 
made it blossom. " She saw clearly, what Perrault 
and his fellows had felt dimly a century before, — that 
modern literature would draw from modern conditions 
a more natural nourishment for a healthier life. 

The fundamental idea was true, and the time was 
opportune for its proclamation ; but the example was 
not an adequate illustration of it. Neither in Ger- 
many nor in France was there a long and, above all, 
not a healthy life in store for the Eomantic revival 
that dazzled her. She did not see that emancipation 
from rules could not emancipate from the fundamental 
laws of taste, and that German Eomanticism was as 
factitious an imitation as pseudo-classicism had been. 
The true glory of German literature lay, not in the 
Schlegels, Eichter, and Novalis, but in Lessing, Schil- 
ler, and Goethe ; while German philosophy was weak 
from the very fact that it was not an expression of the 
true national spirit, but, as Goethe saw and said, " a 
parasite sapping the strength of the people. " 

" De l'Allemagne " is divided into four parts. Her 



MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBRIAND. 133 

chapters on the country, the people and their ways, 
are neither very profound nor very accurate ; yet they 
show an attentive observation and a ready, receptive 
mind, quick to see what she desired and expected to 
see. She gives special chapters to Berlin and Vienna, 
and notes the deep racial lines that separate Prussians, 
Saxons, Bavarians, and Austrians. Indeed, she seems 
here less a traveller than a student of comparative 
sociology, and finds herself much more at ease when 
she can turn from provinces and cities to books and 
ideas, to " Literature and the Arts, " where indeed lit- 
erature occupies two hundred and eighty-three pages 
and the arts eleven. This is the most valuable and 
fruitful part of the book. Partial and warped as the 
judgments often are, they revealed to France, and in 
some measure to England also, an unsuspected mine of 
wealth, from which foreign nations had drawn little 
up to that time, and have never since ceased to draw 
in increasing measure. It matters little that the 
modern reader discovers some egregious monuments of 
false perspective, little that she could not discern 
in Lessing " a dramatic author of the first rank, " 
gave to him less space than to Werner, and to the 
Schlegels twice as much as to Herder. It matters 
little, either, that the watery Klopstock is her favorite 
German poet; that her criticism of the works of 
Schiller and Goethe accords ill with our later aesthet- 
ics ; that she thinks " Don Carlos " as important as 
" Wallenstein, " and * Egmont " the finest of Goethe's 
tragedies. What does matter is that she had a gen- 
erous appreciation for this foreign literature, and 
inspired it in others, who afterward corrected her 
judgments. But though its shortcomings are obvious, 
it might be hard to find, even to-day, so just a view 



134 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

of a foreign contemporary literature. " The instinct 
of the true and beautiful supplied the inevitable im- 
perfection of her knowledge, " though her optimistic 
" criticism of the beauties " tended to foster an 
unsystematic dilettantism. 

It is possible that Madame de Stael attributed more 
importance to the portions of her book that treat of 
" Philosophy and Ethics " and of " Keligion and Enthu- 
siasm * than the event has proved them to possess. 
To be partial and incomplete was more dangerous here 
than in literature, and German metaphysicians owe 
her a less debt for the effort to make them intelligible 
to Frenchmen than they do to Cousin or to Heine. It 
has been said, and truly, that the history of idealism 
from 1780 to 1817 is in her works, but that persis- 
tently optimistic idealism was rather a survival of the 
eighteenth century than an anticipation of the domi- 
nant currents of philosophic thought in the nineteenth 
century. Nor was it a survival of what was strongest 
and best in that period. As Faguet observes, it had 
in it more of Montesquieu and of Vauvenargues than 
of Voltaire, little of Eousseau, nothing of Diderot. 
It was this partial reflection of the eighteenth century 
that was confirmed and revivified in her by contact with 
German idealism. But the effect of this attitude of 
mind on literature, as appears in Germany and in 
Madame de Stael, was to dwarf the sense for beauty of 
form. She, at least, had little comprehension of liter- 
ary art, whether in the ancient or in the French clas- 
sics. As has been aptly said, " she represents a 
moment when the eighteenth century in its decline no 
longer comprehends antique art, cares no longer for its 
own, guards and cherishes its philosophic ideas, which 
it feels will be very fruitful, and, as for a new art, 
questions, searches, doubts, waits. " 



MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBRIAND. 135 

For that a new art was to arise from the chaos of the 
Kevolution, that its convulsions were to be the birth- 
throes of a new critical spirit, was the first article of 
Madame de Stael's critical creed; and the zeal of her 
preaching carried such persuasion that, as she had said 
of Kousseau, " while she invented nothing she set all 
on fire. " And so, at a moment when France was in 
the glow of its new cosmopolitanism, she was able to 
infuse a considerable portion of the European spirit 
into what had been, till then, a too narrowly national 
literature. 

But if De Stael's criticism draws its solvent power 
from the eighteenth century, her greatest literary con- 
temporary, Chateaubriand, raises the standard of lit- 
erary and ethical revolt from it. He joins direct 
issue with her comfortable theory of perfectibility, and 
to her deistic optimism he opposes first a skeptical, 
then a Christian pessimism. " Everywhere that 
Madame de Stael sees perfectibility, I see Jesus 
Christ," he writes to Fontanes in 1801; and the sen- 
timent takes such hold on his emotions that he pres- 
ently transforms himself into a sworn crusader, more 
jealous of the honor of the mediaeval church than even 
of his own orthodoxy. 

But there is something histrionic even in the most 
solemn protestations of Chateaubriand. In his life and 
in his books he poses and parades his art with a colossal 
egoism which seems to have overawed contemporary 
critics almost as much as it exasperated their succes- 
sors. Napoleon is to him " the tyrant who made the 
world tremble, but who never made me tremble. " 
He imagines the Emperor's daily anxiety to be to 
create offices that will bind Chateaubriand's proud 
spirit to his service. Indeed, he thinks Napoleon's 



136 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

fall due chiefly to his own " Genius of Christianity. " 
Instinctively he ranks himself as the associate, the 
equal, possibly the superior of that compeller of states. 
Hence Chateaubriand is led to attribute public interest 
to his private feelings, and in his books the subjec- 
tivity that the Classicists had carefully suppressed is 
omnipresent and confessed. Thus he contributed 
essentially to the revival of egoism in literature that 
resulted from the teachings of De Stael. All his 
heroes are but Chateaubriand in thin disguise. His 
Christianity is a personal sentiment, not a product of 
universal reason. What made him a knight of the 
cross was not the stern beauty of truth, but the poetry 
of what seemed to his youth a lost cause and the mys- 
tic charm of mediaeval legend. Even in his account 
of a journey to Jerusalem, the thrilled pilgrim will 
exclaim : " I weep, but 't is to the sound of the lyre of 
Orpheus. " 

Though both De Stael and Chateaubriand were aris- 
tocrats, they were strongly contrasted in their lives, 
and so supplemented each other in their literary 
influence. She owed her birth to Protestant Switzer- 
land, he to profoundly Catholic Brittany. 1 And in his 
boyhood everything combined to nurse a spirit opposed 
in all ways to that which animated Madame Keeker's 
Parisian salon. He has told us himself, in a most 

1 Born at Saint-Malo, 1768; died, 1848. Works in order of time : 
Essai sur les revolutions, 1797; Atala, 1801; Genie clu christianisme, 
1802; Atala et Rene, 1805; Les Martyrs, 1809; Itineraire d'un voy- 
age de Paris a Jerusalem, 1811; then political pamphlets till the col- 
lected edition'of his works, 1826-1831, which contains the "Natchez" 
and the " Abencerrages ; " Memoires d'outre-tombe, 1849-1850. 

Critical appreciations in Lanson, p. 868 ; in Eaguet, xix. siecle ; in 
Brunetiere, Evolution de la poesie lyrique, p. 83 ; and Evolution de la 
critique, p. 180. The biographical literature is cited by Lanson. 



MADAME DE STALL AND CHATEAUBRIAND. 137 

effective passage, how the warm and simple piety of 
his mother, the distant reserve of his father, the mys- 
terious vastness of the neighboring ocean, the strange 
legends of that simple and childlike people, combined 
to foster in him the poet and the mystic, and to evoke 
the religious sentiment. 

In Brittany he passed his childhood. For his educa- 
tion he went to l)ol and Eennes, towns not too distant 
to break the Breton spell. He entered the army at 
twenty, and was tempted to try his fortune in India, 
a land attractive to his imaginative temperament. But 
the Eevolution diverted him from this project, and 
presently sent the young enthusiast to the opposite side 
of the globe. In 1791 he went to America on a gov- 
ernment commission, ostensibly to seek the Northwest 
Passage, which, however, he neither found nor sought. 
But his journey was far from fruitless to himself or 
to France; for he travelled, though not perhaps so 
extensively as he implies, among the great lakes and 
prairies of the West, and amid the luxuriant vegeta- 
tion of semi-tropical Florida, stimulating his vivid 
imagination by intercourse with Indian tribes and by 
the solitude of primeval forests. These influences first 
revealed the poet to himself, and were in their turn 
revealed in all his future works, but most brilliantly 
in " Natchez, * in " Ken<5, " and in " Atala. " 

Chateaubriand, with a considerable part of the nobil- 
ity of France, sympathized with the early efforts of 
the Revolutionists, for he was convinced that political 
reform was a necessity. But the excesses of 1791 and 
1792 sobered his enthusiasm on his return to France, 
where his parents arranged for him a hasty and un- 
happy marriage. This, together with the execution of 
the king, made him cast his lot with the party of the 



138 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

emigres, though he was not then or ever wholly in 
sympathy with the policy of reaction that they repre- 
sented. But the hopes of the Bourbons were presently 
crushed at Valmy ; and Chateaubriand, sick and 
wounded, went to England, where he remained till 
1800. These seven years of exile could not but have 
some effect on his literary and ethical views, but 
he learned much less in England than Voltaire or 
Beaumarchais had done. He supported himself by 
translating, and found leisure to write a somewhat pes- 
simistic and skeptical essay on " Kevolutions, * which 
is interesting for its youthful declaration of independ- 
ence from the smug optimism of Condorcet. It was in 
England, too, that he elaborated u Natchez, " " Eene, " 
and " Atala, " in which American* Indians are idealized 
in the spirit of Bernardin's " Paul and Virginia " and 
Kousseau's " natural state. " Therefore in substance 
they carry his conviction, while in form they hover 
between poetry and prose in a way that may repel 
modern taste, but greatly fascinated that of his 
time. 

Though these books were begun before the publica- 
tion of the " Essay on Bevolutions, " there is a change 
to be noted in their ethical position that appears most 
clearly in his attitude toward Christianity. The 
" Essay " of 1797 was coldly skeptical ; in 1801 " Atala " 
was warmly sympathetic. This change Chateaubriand 
attributes to the death of his mother, in 1798 ; but he 
is not always a trustworthy witness about himself. 
He mingles, like Goethe, " fiction and truth ; " but, 
unlike Goethe, he does not say so. Still, however 
that may be, " Atala " struck a note that set all hearts 
vibrating ; it won immediate and universal popularity. 
The eloquent descriptions of nature showed that the 



MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBRIAND. 139 

author had rare powers of minute observation, and the 
use that he made of it roused the dormant spirit of 
romantic idealism. It gave expression to a mental 
state that had not yet found a voice in France ; it an- 
ticipated much in Lamartine and in Hugo. At the 
opening of the century Chateaubriand had no impor- 
tant rival ; and even when Madame de Stael claimed a 
place beside him, he seemed still the leading figure in 
French letters till Lamartine charmed the world with 
the fascinating anodyne of his " Meditations. " 

Encouraged by the reception of " Atala, " he brought 
the " Genius of Christianity " to a close just at the 
moment (1802) when Napoleon was on the eve of his 
official recognition and restoration of the National 
Church, which, indeed, had been practically restored 
since 1796. Chateaubriand's book has been called, and 
is, a brilliant bit of special pleading; but none the 
less it served its purpose and Napoleon's. To discuss 
its author's real convictions is beside our purpose. He 
himself thought his mind " made to believe in noth- 
ing, not even in itself; made to disdain all, — gran- 
deurs, pettinesses, peoples, kings; and yet dominated 
by a rational instinct of submission to all that was 
beautiful, — religion, justice, equality, liberty, glory. " 
Hence one might infer that it was an aesthetic rather 
than a moral attraction that drew him to the Chris- 
tian Church, into which he could thus carry his 
pessimism and, indeed, his fundamental skepticism, 
while all the time he was probably as sincere as he 
knew how to be, and only gave a striking illustration 
of the price that rational beings must pay for senti- 
mental emotions. Logical consistency was never his 
prominent characteristic, nor is reason the pole-star of 
the " Genius of Christianity. " But though its argu- 



140 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

ment is often puerile, its passion and its eloquence 
carried it quickly to the hearts of a public weary of 
the dead-sea fruit of Encyclopaedist philosophy, a 
public whose languid will to believe could be more 
easily thrilled by rhetoric than moved by reason. 
Author and readers were less interested to find that 
Christianity was true than that it was sentimentally 
poetic, beautifully pathetic, artistically aesthetic. 

This book won Chateaubriand a diplomatic post in 
Borne, but his intriguing spirit made it necessary to 
transfer him to Switzerland ; and after the execution 
of the Due d'Enghien he resigned all diplomatic 
preferment and criticised Napoleon freely, exposing 
himself to more than he actually suffered, though his 
oration at his reception to the Academy occasioned a 
brief exile, and a newspaper x that he controlled was 
suppressed. This check to his political activity re- 
aroused in him the spirit of travel, but not till he had 
discovered and proclaimed in " Ren£ " that maladie 
du siecle, the morbid toying with melancholy that had 
inspired " Werther " in Germany, and spread its conta- 
gion to England in " Childe Harold. " Having left 
this virulent bacillus behind him, Chateaubriand set 
out on an Eastern journey; visited Greece, Turkey, 
Asia Minor, Palestine, and, on his return, Tunis and 
Spain, carrying with him everywhere the same keen 
but mournful eye that had seen such vivid and sombre 
pictures in the American forests and prairies, and the 
same imagination that had shed a romantic halo over 
all. 

The direct result of this trip was the " Narrative of 
a Journey from Paris to Jerusalem ; " but he first em- 
bodied his impressions in " Les Martyrs, " which, in- 
1 "Le Mercure," founded in 1807. 



MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBRIAND. 141 

deed he began before setting out on his journey. This 
is a prose epic of rising Christianity and sinking pagan- 
ism, that carries its action from the Orient to Gaul, 
and reaches its climax in the amphitheatre at Eome. 
"The Last of the Abencerrages, " printed in 1826, 
was also a belated fruit of this journey. Indeed, 
practically all the work of Chateaubriand that is still 
read with pleasure, or with curiosity that it should 
have excited pleasure, is included in the eleven years 
1801-1811. With the fall of Napoleon, his activity 
as an ethical and imaginative writer yields almost 
wholly to the demands of party politics, while the 
purely literary work that then appeared was only 
what prudence had withheld from the censors of the 
Empire. 

Yet in its sphere this political writing is closely 
parallel in its methods and in its effect to the former ; 
it shows the same " opulence of imagination and pov- 
erty of heart. " His first production in this field, 
" Buonaparte and the Bourbons " (1814), is a sort of 
" Genius of Eoyalty " modelled on the " Genius of 
Christianity. " Louis XVIII. thought its bitter elo- 
quence and hate worth a hundred thousand men to the 
Legitimist cause. But here, as there, his feeling has 
more sentimental warmth than logical consistency. 
He tells us himself that in 1826, in spite of all he had 
suffered for the House of Bourbon, he was still thought 
a doubtful Christian and a dubious Eoyalist. Hence 
it is not surprising to find that he was as inconvenient 
to his friends when in power as to his enemies when 
in opposition. Various diplomatic posts were aban- 
doned for vigorous pamphlet wars on the ministries he 
disliked, and at the close of the Bestoration period 
he seemed drifting toward the liberal party. But a 



142 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

pessimist is not happy to be in the majority, and the 
triumph of the Orleanists brought him back promptly 
to the defence of the lost cause. " I cannot serve pas- 
sions in their triumph, " he had said. " Always ready 
to devote myself to the unfortunate, I understand noth- 
ing of prosperity. " These sentiments were certainly 
characteristic and possibly sincere ; those who wept 
over " Ken£ " thought them noble and edifying. But 
as he realized the hopeless case of the Legitimists, 
he gradually lost heart, and toward the close of his 
life, though he was still the lion of literary salons, 
he sank into a discouraged silence, occupying his 
gloomy mood with translating " Paradise Lost " and 
writing a life of the ascetic Kanc& He revised and 
completed also his " Memoirs from beyond the Tomb, " 
— " Bene with documentary evidence, " as it has been 
wittily called, — a work of quite unique conceit and 
much political prejudice, but yet of remarkable elo- 
quence and some historic interest. He died on the 
fourth of July, 1848, in the midst of a social revolu- 
tion that must have shrouded his pessimism in still 
deeper gloom. 

The literary significance of Chateaubriand is to be 
sought in " Atala, " in " Ken<3, " in the " Genius of 
Christianity, " and in the " Martyrs ; " and to understand 
their effect it is necessary to bear in mind somewhat 
of their contents. " Atala * is a short idyl of a young 
Indian girl of that name, who loves Chactas, an Indian 
captive among her nation. But she is a Christian, and 
has sworn to her mother a perpetual virginity. Their 
tale is told by Chactas to Bene-Chateaubriand as they 
float together down the hroad Ohio. This thoroughly 
romantic Indian has been in Europe, and has a nature 
of strangely wedded culture and savagery. A solitary 









MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBRIAND. 143 

missonary, Father Aubry, completes the dramatis per- 
sonce of the little tragedy, where duty conquers love, 
but only by the sacrifice of the life of the gentle 
heroine. The simple and solemn pathos of the story 
came like a new birth to men whose ears were dulled 
with the verses of Delille, and its austere Christianity 
was a revelation to those who had sought a vain 
satisfaction in the negations of Voltaire and Diderot. 
Slighter even than Goethe's "Werther," it had a re- 
nown almost as wide and as lasting. It was trans- 
lated into the chief languages of Europe, and is said 
to have found its way into the very penetralia of the 
Sultan's seraglio. 

" Atala " is certainly untrue to savage nature ; its 
pathos is artificial, but its publication is a date of 
importance in French literature, for it marks the begin- 
ning of the Romantic School. The danger was felt in- 
stinctively by the Classicists, who bitterly attacked its 
aesthetics ; for though it was restrained in comparison 
to later works of Eomantic imagination, they saw that 
it was inconsistent with the spirit of the eighteenth 
century, even more than with that of the seventeenth. 
And the work of Chateaubriand that followed only 
intensified this antagonism ; for what is involved in 
" Atala " is made the central thesis of the " Genius of 
Christianity, " his most ambitious effort, both literary 
and ethical, though the elaborate table of contents 
prefixed to that work promises a more logical treatment 
than the book realizes, while the apparatus of De- 
fence, Letters, Notes, and Explanations at the close, 
suggests a learned treatise rather than an oratorical 
plea. 

The dogmas and- doctrines of Christianity are first 
discussed; then its poetry, its art and literature, and 



144 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

its worship. Each part, too, has the appearance of 
rigid analysis. Thus the second elaborately compares 
classical and Christian poetry, and closes with an an- 
tithetical study of the Bible and Homer. Each sec- 
tion, also, is analyzed. If the apologist is contrasting 
pagan and Christian character, he speaks first of hus- 
bands and wives, then of fathers, mothers, sons, daugh- 
ters, priests, and warriors ; and in every case he finds 
that the Christian author has refined and embellished 
the classic ideals. The true faith is also the more beau- 
tiful and the more sympathetic. But if this description 
applies to a great part of the " Genius, " the author 
rises also at times to veritable theological dithyram- 
bics, as when, for instance, he undertakes to prove the 
existence of God from the marvels of Nature ; and some 
of his finest passages are descriptive panegyrics, such 
as the remarkable chapters on the Mass that open the 
concluding part, or the subsequent section on Christian 
missions, where the little story of " Atala " may have 
had its original place. 

Such a book draws more from imagination than from 
reason, and appeals to the emotions more than to the 
sober sense of its readers. Here one is asked to con- 
sider " whether the diviuities of paganism have poeti- 
cally the superiority over the Christian divinities " 
(1. iv. ch. 4). Here foi (faith) is commended for its 
supposed connection with foyer (hearthstone) ; the 
three Graces are adduced to prove the Trinity, and 
teleology finds its reduction to the absurd in the mi- 
gration of birds precisely at the time when they are 
convenient for human food, and in the assumption that 
" domestic animals are born with exactly enough 
instinct to be tamed. " Yes, Chateaubriand will offer 
the constellation of the Southern Cross as a witness of 



MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBRIAND. 145 

Christianity, and defend the celibacy of the clergy by 
Mai thus' Law ! And yet the student of literary evolu- 
tion will perceive that it is just such a revindication 
of the rights of sentiment that was a necessary condi- 
tion of the revival of the personal forms of literature, 
and especially of lyric poetry. It is the spirit of the 
" Genius " that inspires the first utterances of Hugo and 
Lamartine. Chateaubriand supplements and continues 
the protest of Eousseau's " Savoyard Vicar " against 
the Gradgrind materialism of the Encyclopaedists. 

" Ken£ " had formed part of the " Genius ;" but it 
had closer affiliations with " Atala " than with Chris- 
tianity, and was reprinted separately in 1807, possi- 
bly, as has been suggested, to induce those to read it 
who would not read the " G&iie, " and those to read the 
" Genie * who did not care to find " Ben£ " there. This 
mouthpiece of Chateaubriand's dilettante pessimism 
had been the supposed narrator of " Atala, " and the 
scene is once more laid in the primeval forests of the 
Mississippi valley. Chactas reappears ; and there is a 
mission priest, more human than Aubry, who speaks 
for Chateaubriand the Christian idealist, while Eene 
exhibits the blase aristocrat, nursing his world-pain 
like another Werther. 

This disconsolate young man had passed most of his 
boyhood " watching the fugitive clouds " and listen- 
ing to the rain. He had a sister 1 who presently 
turned nun, but natural inconstancy aided prejudice to 
divert him from a like design. He nursed the germs 
of melancholy amid the ruins of Greece and Italy. 
Modern civilization accentuated his idle ennui. He 
sought the gentle children of Nature, the Indians of 

1 Obviously studied from Chateaubriand's own sister Lucile, who 
died in 1804. 

10 



146 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

French Louisiana, who, moi;e sensible and happy than 
he, had let life slip by, " seated tranquil beneath their 
oaks, " their only melancholy an excess of bliss that 
they checked by a glance at heaven. Still, brief expe- 
rience sufficed to convince him of his incompatibility 
even with this society ; and he renounced all intercourse, 
save with Chactas and the priest, to whom he related 
his " secret sentiments " and the " languid struggles " 
of his " Bomanesque spirit " against the necessary evil 
of life. 

It is these " secret sentiments, " of which those of 
Kent's sort had always enough and to spare, that were 
the charm of " Ben£, " and the literary source and 
origin of the paralysis of the will nursed by vain 
dreams, that maladie du siecle that has sicklied o'er 
the thought of so many in France who seemed capable 
of better things, — of Lamartine, of De Vigny, and in 
another way of De Musset and the young George Sand. 
It blights the Joseph Delorme of Sainte-Beuve and 
the Antony of Dumas. It may be traced also, though 
masked by the stronger power of Byron, in the dramas 
of Victor Hugo. 

This little tale of morbid, introspective pessimism 
struck a note that swayed the whole fabric of society 
by the responsive vibrations that it awakened. It did 
this because, though it was unnatural, it was genuine. 
The book was affected, but so were the man and the 
age. If Ben^ tells us that " people weary him by dint 
of loving him, " the private correspondence of Chateau- 
briand is full of the same aristocratic melancholy, full 
of assurances that he is " quite blase and indifferent to 
everything but religion, * dragging dreamily his ennui 
with his days, and crying for some one to deliver him 
from the " insane impulse to live. " That sigh of Job, 






MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBEIAND. 147 

" My soul is fatigued with my life, " is the burden and 
refrain of " Natchez. " 

" Les Martyrs " exhibits the " Genius " applied to 
Eomantic fiction. In a cadenced style and epic 
diction that need only rhyme and metre to make a 
poem, Chateaubriand has contrasted the morals, sacri- 
fices, and ceremonial of pagan and Christian worship 
in the times of Diocletian. Here the reader may find 
" the language of Genesis beside that of the Odyssey, " 
and see " the Jupiter of Homer beside the Jehovah of 
Milton. " But Chateaubriand has fallen into the snare 
that is stretched for every historical novelist. Not 
only has he forced chronology and geography in his 
zeal to include the principal characters of the ante- 
Nicene church, but he has enlarged his scope so that 
he takes in the philosophes of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, and even the French Eevolution. Julian the 
Apostate reaches the hand to Voltaire, and Homer to 
Volney. The result, as his most generous critic has 
admitted, is a grandiose failure, composite and artifi- 
cial, original only when it gives up the vain attempt 
to imitate Dante and Milton, and abandons the reli- 
gious epic for the historical novel. But even here the 
author staggers a little under the weight of his anti- 
quarian lore. He seems intent on describing the whole 
of the then known world, from Borne to the Thebaid 
and from the Netherlands to Arcady; and in later 
editions he fortified the book with prefaces, analyses, 
and notes, that might find a more appropriate grave in 
the " Bevue des questions historiques. " In its day, 
however, the book was repeatedly reprinted, and 
critics still couple the name of its hero, Eudore, with 
Corneille's Polyeucte, to prove how narrowly false it 
is to exclude, with Boileau, " the terrible mysteries 



148 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

of the Christian faith " from the realm of literary 
art. 

The " Journey from Paris to Jerusalem" illustrates 
from another side the same combination of fiction and 
guide-book, of pseudo-Christian and crypto-pagan. 
Here the weary dilettante grows dejected at Troy, and 
discouraged over the past glories of Sparta and Athens, 
while he nurses his mind to a proper desolation for the 
ruins of Jerusalem, Egypt, and Carthage. His powers 
of natural description, always remarkable, are here at 
their height ; and the sea proves a fruitful inspiration 
to his mournful muse ; but even the best passages are 
marred by intrusive subjectivity, by what he calls 
" the secret and ineffable charms of a soul enjoying 
itself." The "Journey" is Chateaubriand's most 
cited work ; but the citations are almost wholly con- 
fined to the objective part of the book, his descriptions 
of Nature and historical evocations. 

This brings us to speak of one of the most important 
and enduring results of Chateaubriand's writing. He 
is the first recreator of the past, the inspirer of the 
modern popular historian. He first drew attention to 
the literary mine that lay hid in the middle ages 
and in Christian antiquity, treasures exploited almost 
too eagerly by the Romanticists. " Imagination, " he 
had said, " is to erudition the scout that is always 
reconnoitring. " In his hands history became poetry, 
revealing new possibilities to the student and new 
fields to literature. The exact studies of his predeces- 
sors may have contained the truth ; it was reserved for 
this artist to make that truth live again. But 
Chateaubriand was also the founder of the modern 
descriptive school; and he was able to be this, be- 
cause, as we have seen, he added to his love for the 



MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBRIAND. 149 

ages of faith a naive paganism, so that, as some one 
has wittily observed, " his pilgrim staff changed occa- 
sionally into a thyrsus. " From this pagan element 
came an increased love of Nature, an affectionate study 
of her moods as minute as that of Bernardin, with an 
idealization and personification of her changing beau- 
ties that suggest Ossian and presage the Eomantic 
School, of whose advent there had already been signs 
in Eousseau, Buffon, and Saint-Pierre. But Chateau- 
briand was first in France to describe scenes with a vivid 
imagery that conjured before the mind horizons such 
as his readers had never seen. Whether these hori- 
zons were true or false, whether his classic Greece or 
his Merovingian France or his Natchez Indians had 
anything in history or in fact to correspond to them, 
is from a literary point of view w T holly indifferent. It 
is enough that they gave a vivid sensation of novelty, 
and opened all history and nature to the poetic vision 
of the next generation, as the " Genius of Christianity * 
had already opened the treasures of its historic faith. 
Without Chateaubriand it is as hard to conceive 
Thierry or Michelet as it is Flaubert or Loti. 2 

If it was Chateaubriand's ambition " to rival Bos- 
suet and ruin Voltaire," he undertook tasks both of 
which were beyond a man who had neither the robust 
faith of the one, nor the mocking confidence of the other. 
And yet he marks the close of a period of literary 
evolution that had begun with the Pleiad two centu- 
ries and a half before, and he marks also the beginning 
of a new era. He, probably more than De Stael, per- 
suaded the new generation that it was safe to break 
with tradition, with those imitations of imitations that 

1 Chateaubriand's influence on lyric poetry is discussed by Bru- 
netiere, Evolution de la poe'sie lyiique, i. 83-96. 



150 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

had been sapping the life of French literature since 
the close of the seventeenth century. He convinced 
them of what she had taught by implication, — that, 
since literature must be in touch with the people, 
French literature, if it would be to France what Greek 
and Latin were to Greece and Italy, must be national 
in its aspirations and Christian in its spirit. But to 
do this was to point the way to the greatest literary 
achievements of the next generation. 

This has been clear to nearly all the French critics 
that have followed. * He changed, " said Villemain, 
" in the moral order a part of the opinions of the cen- 
tury ; he brought back literature to religion, and the 
religious spirit to the spirit of liberty ; he has been a 
renovator in imagination, criticism, and history. " This 
may seem an exaggeration; and yet Sainte-Beuve is, 
perhaps, too cautious when he damns him with faint 
praise as " the most striking of his contemporaries at 
the beginning of the century, " for Nisard is willing to 
grant him " the initial inspiration as well as the final 
impulse of all the durable innovations of the first half 
of the century in poetry, history, and criticism ; " and 
Brunetikre is constrained to admit that he held for 
those decades " a literary royalty comparable only to 
that of Voltaire. " So there was a measure of truth 
in Fontanes' bold words to Napoleon, that Chateau- 
briand shed glory on his reign ; and in the tribute of 
the historian Thierry, who, writing in 1840, declares 
that all the typical thinkers of the century " had met 
Chateaubriand at the source of their studies, at their 
first inspirations. Not one but should say to him, as 
Dante to Virgil : ' Thou leader, thou lord, and thou 
master. ' " 

Thus in Chateaubriand and in Madame de Steel we 



MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBRIAND. 151 

should recognize not only the beginning, but the source 
of the literary evolution of their century. From her 
came its new ideas, from him its new art. His style 
has left its mark on French poetry, history, fiction, on 
the very language itself. To George Sand he seemed 
" the greatest writer of the century." De Vigny and 
Hugo, Flaubert and Leconte de Lisle, even Lamartine, 
saw in him their model, "the incomparable artist." 
It was not till Naturalism rose that his star began to 
wane. 



152 MODEKN FRENCH LITERATURE. 



CHAPTEE V. 

THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 

In 1823 a company of English actors undertook to 
present in Paris the masterpieces of Shakspere. They 
were hissed, hooted ; an angry spectator shouted that 
Shakspere was the aide-de-camp of Wellington ; others 
translated their feelings into action, and threw at the 
stage such missiles as came to hand with so much vio- 
lence that an actress was injured. To hate England 
was the ABC of patriotism; Germany was hardly 
more popular, and a literary reform that seemed to 
savor of either was condemned in advance. It is 
harder for the conquered to be generous than for the 
conqueror; and in the years that followed Waterloo, 
those who preached a narrow nationalism in literature, 
the classicism of the seventeenth century as inter- 
preted by the eighteenth, had an easy task in rousing 
the prejudices even of the cultured. 

Yet already there were signs of change in popular 
feeling. While the Classicists diligently ploughed 
and harrowed their sterile fields and reaped their 
stunted crops, the younger generation was dissatisfied 
and restless. At first the spread of these feelings was 
checked by a curious though not unnatural coincidence. 
Up to that time the liberals in politics had been reac- 
tionaries in literature, while the literary reformers 
handicapped their cause with a sentimental devotion 
to throne and altar. One sees this in the new spa- 



THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 153 

pers of the time; but, best of all, in Hugo's youthful 
poems — " his follies before he was born, " as he used to 
call them — and in his Boyalist " Odes and Ballads. " 
Something of the same spirit can be found in all the 
future leaders of the Eomantic School. Thus, for a 
time, independence and individualism in literature 
became identified with medievalism and the ultra- 
Catholic Eestoration. But it was soon seen that this 
connection was purely fortuitous. In the year after 
the English actors had been driven from the stage, the 
foundation of the " Globe " newspaper testified that 
the new spirit accorded with the most ardent patriot- 
ism ; and prejudice was hardly dispelled before writers 
of the younger school — Thierry, Thiers, Guizot, and 
Mignet in history, Cousin in philosophy, Lamartine 
and Hugo in poetry — showed to the world that the 
genius of France was ready to break with its outworn 
past. 

Several elements combined to make these years 
favorable to a revolt from tradition. The rising gen- 
eration had passed their youth in a time when classical 
studies and the amenities of literature were neglected 
or obscured by the rush of events and the glories of 
the Empire. The energies nursed in a time of action 
were directed now to the field of imagination, and 
claimed a broader scope than had sufficed for their 
elders. 1 This movement of the world-spirit was by 
no means confined to France, and the cosmopolitanism 
that had been preached by De Stael aided it by trans- 
lations from the English and German Eomanticists. 
As early as 1809 Constant had adapted Schiller's 

1 So Hugo says : — 

Nous froissons dans nos mains, helas inoccupe'es, 
Des lyres a defaut dYpeps, 
Nous cbantons corame on combattrait. 



154 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

" Wallenstein " to French taste; Schlegel's " Lectures 
on Dramatic Literature * were translated in 1814, and 
in the same year the Spanish " Eomance of the Cid " 
was done into French. A little later Raynouard 
edited an anthology of the Troubadours, and Scott's 
essay on them was translated. In 1821 Shakspere and 
Schiller were turned into French, and Byron soon fol- 
lowed, with such a numerous company of works of 
like tendency that enumeration is at once tedious and 
superfluous. 1 

The ferment of independence spread rapidly. All 
the young men were for liberty, and their talents made 
them each year more and more the lions of the literary 
salons, while the conservative " periwigs " grew less 
supercilious and less confident. In 1827 the tide had 
set so decidedly that the season's dramatic success 
was achieved by a company of English actors, among 
them Kean, Macready, and Kemble ; and in December 
of that year the impression of their performances was 
fixed and formulated by Hugo's profession of dramatic 
faith in the preface to his " Cromwell. " From this 
point to 1830 the Eomantic emancipation of the ego 
makes a constant crescendo culminating in the epic 
conflict in which Hugo's " Hernani " served as a mod- 
ern body of Patroclus, till the Eevolution of July 
(1830) crowned the Eomanticist triumph. For liter- 
ary reform was now wholly identified with the liberal 
movement in politics, while the reactionaries had be- 
come involved in the popular condemnation that swept 
away the Legitimist throne. After 1830 the emancipa- 
tion of individualism had only itself to fear. It could 
develop unchecked on the stage and in the press. But 

1 See Lanson, Litterature francaise, p. 916, for further titles, and 
also Brunetiere, Etudes critiques, i. 279. 



THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 155 

its unchallenged rule was very brief ; indeed, as a sys- 
tem, it passed into history with the fiasco of Hugo's 
" Burgraves " in 1843. Yet it has never ceased to be an 
all-pervading influence in the whole period that follows. 
It has fostered and almost transformed the study of 
history ; it is the inspiration of the modern novel of 
whatever shibboleth. 1 

A school implies a master and rules or principles ; 
but it is hard to say who was the master or what were 
the rules of this group of writers who asserted so vig- 
orous a life and enjoyed so brief a triumph. Hugo is 
greatest among them ; but he is not master, for the 
very essence of the movement lies in the free scope 
that it claims for the development of individual- 
ity in the assertion of the rights of imagination, re- 
stricted and confined since Malherbe's day. Their early 
strength, the bond of their cohesion, lay in the protest 
against what they thought the mummeries of Classi- 
cism, and men might share this who shared nothing 
else. Hence we find sculptors and painters among 
the foremost to "respond to Hernani's horn," for 
they felt that dramatic liberty involved their own. 
They could be rallied for any attack on artistic 
conventions. The very first verse of " Hernani " 
was meant and taken as a challenge to metrical 
precedent; and repeated contemptuous allusions to 
old age in the same piece voiced a like sentiment. 
The iconoclasts were as extreme as the conservatives. 
Shouts of " Down with Eacine ! " enlivened the the- 
atres; while Gautier, with a band of long-haired, 
youthful enthusiasts, danced a saraband around the 

1 See Brunetiere, ^Epoques du theatre francais, 340, and Zola, 
Romanciers naturalistes, p. 376, who complains, there and elsewhere, 
that he cannot get his feet out of the Romantic snare. 



156 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

statue of that courtly tragedian before the faces of a 
shocked bourgeoisie. 

Behind this impatience of control, the unreasoning 
self-assertion of youth conscious of its strength and 
over-sanguine of its powers, there was a calmer and 
more reasoning desire for a freer expression of emotion 
and art, especially in lyric and dramatic poetry. It was, 
then, in the nature of the movement that each genius 
should develop independently. Hugo, the greatest of 
them, will demand a place apart. Others, like Stend- 
hal, appear more fitly among the precursors of Natural- 
ism; others, like Sainte-Beuve, among the critics of 
the century. The school, if one may call it so, had 
its nucleus in Charles Nodier (1783-1844), a fanciful 
and romantic sentimentalist, with whom were associ- 
ated first De Vigny and the Deschamp brothers, then 
Lamartine, Hugo, and Sainte-Beuve, who has described 
this " C^nacle, " for so they called themselves, as 
* Eoyalists by birth, Christians by convenance and a 
vague sentimentality. * Their first organ was the 
" Muse franchise ; " and their aim was to nurse and 
rouse the old monarchical spirit, the spirit of mystery 
and spiritual submission, as we find it voiced in La- 
martine 's " Lac " and " Crucifix, " in De Vigny 's " Eloa " 
and " Moise, " and in Hugo's early "Odes and 
Ballads. " 

In form, however, these men soon came to demand 
the fullest independence. They avoided imitation 
even of the most admirable work ; they would not put 
their new wine into old bottles. And presently, in 
the exigencies of controversy, they began to claim 
that even in their own day the Classicists had not 
represented the people, — a view that had far-reaching 
results; for this democratic impulse, once stirred, 



THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 157 

turned the school slowly but surely from legitimacy 
to liberalism, from the Bourbons and the Orleanists to 
the Revolution and Napoleon. Lamartine sings of 
universal emancipation; Hugo, of the Vendome Col- 
umn. 1 These wider sympathies won them a wider 
popularity, and drew to them, even before the Revo- 
lution of July, the valuable alliance of De Musset, 
M6rim£e, and the elder Dumas ; and to these were 
added a little later the distinguished names of Gautier 
and Gerard de Nerval. 

The Eomantic movement owed much to England, 
more probably to Germany, most of all in its ideas to 
De Stael, in its aesthetics to Chateaubriand, in whom 
all united to admire the incomparable artist. Hugo, 
at fourteen, resolves to be " Chateaubriand or noth- 
ing. " 2 So far as Eomanticism is the declaration 
of literary individualism, the negation of classical 
dogmatism, it is in large measure the result of 
" L'Allemagne ; " but from its positive side, in its 
reassertion of the rights of imagination, it is far more 
the revival of the emotions of Christianity in a society 
whose fearful experiences had inspired a will to be- 
lieve without altogether satisfying its reason. Chris- 
tianity to these Romanticists is not the robust faith of 
Bossuet, but the lassitude of men weary of negation, 
seeking food for a re-aroused spiritual nature. To 
this mental state the " Genius of Christianity " was a 
revelation of beauty and art. " The cross raised by 
Chateaubriand over every avenue of human intelli- 
gence, " to borrow Hugo's phrase, cast its shadow over 
the " Odes and Ballads, " which palpitate with a medi- 

1 Contrast, in the " Odes et Ballades/' book i. 1 1 and ii. 4 with iii 
3, 5, 6, 7. 

2 V. Hugoraconte, ii. 106 (July 10, 1816). 



158 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

aeval faith ; it inspires the spiritualism of Lamartine 
and the young De Vigny; and if De Musset seems 
rather to echo the eighteenth century, it is no longer 
with the confident sneer of Voltaire. 

This spiritualism combined with that individualism 
to foster a literary subjectivity ; and to this also De 
Stael and Chateaubriand had pointed the way. Now, 
any attempt " to realize beauty by the expression of 
character, " unless it is upborne, as in Hugo, by colos- 
sal egoism, is apt to become introspectively morbid, 
melancholy, pessimistic, loving best, like Coleridge's 
Genevieve, " the songs that make her grieve, " and so 
in sharp contrast to the objective optimistic calm of 
the Classicists. There is a tendency to flee from the 
grievousness of life to the sentimental contemplation of 
Nature, after the manner of Eousseau and Bernardin, 
to seek solitude where Classicism had sought life. 
Hence these writers nurse their emotions on the medi- 
aeval Christian past, while Greece and Eome had been 
more sympathetic to the School of 1660 and to the 
eighteenth century. But in substituting national tra- 
ditions and Christian legends for the ancient and pa- 
gan ones, the Eomanticists first brought literature in 
touch with the masses of the people. 

Such are the general characteristics of Romanticism ; 
but no writer reflects all its phases, nor were all 
equally imbued with its spirit. This finds its most 
natural expression in lyric poetry, which it is well to 
study before considering the effect of Bomanticism on 
the drama and fiction. 

First in time among the poets are B^ranger, who 
cannot be reckoned as in full sympathy with the 
movement, and Lamartine, who drew away from it 
after his early successes. These may serve to intro- 



THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 159 

duce an attempt to show the evolution of Eomantic 
poetry as it appears in the verses of De Musset, De 
Vigny, and Gautier. B^ranger, in a vast number of 
songs that deal with love, wine, politics, and espe- 
cially with Napoleon, whose legend he did much to 
establish, continues the song-writers of the eighteenth 
century, though he is far more cleanly and much more 
popular. It is as impossible for him as for them to 
be wholly serious. A spice of Gallic mockery lurks 
even in his songs of patriotism and democracy, though 
he strikes here his deepest and most original notes. 1 
Perhaps Bdranger was too democratic in his nature 
and convictions to develop a truly independent lyric 
individuality. His belief in the wisdom of the ma- 
jority is almost a creed ; but this insured his accept- 
ance by the multitude. He reflects faithfully the 
temper of the great middle classes ; and these maintain 
his popularity to-day because they find in his verses 
the completest echo of their own Voltairianism, a hero- 
worship spiced with blague, and love of good-cheer, 
while they are not offended, as more cultured men 
might be, at his mannerisms of language and style. 

Lamartine, on the other hand, is pre-eminently an 
aristocrat both by birth and instinct. 2 He, too, was 
no thorough-going Bomanticist, but he made great and 

1 E. g., Le Vieux drapeau, La Bonne vieille, L'Alliance des 
peuples. See Sainte-Beuve, Portraits contemporains, i. 60. 

2 Born 1790; died 1 869. His principal volumes are — Poetry : Medi- 
tations, 1820; Nouvelles meditations, 1823 ; Harmonies poetiques et 
religieuses, 1830; Jocelyn, 1836 ; La Chute d'un ange, 1838 ; Recueille- 
ments poetiques, 1839. Prose : Voyage en Orient, 1835; Histoire des 
Girondins, 1847; Graziella, 1852. 

Criticism : Sainte-Beuve, Portraits contemporains, i. 1 90 ; Brunetiere, 
Poesie lyrique, i. 107, and Histoire et litterature, iii. 239; Faguet, 
xix. siecle, p. 73 ; Rod, Lamartine (Classiques populaires) ; Descharnel, 
Lamartine ; Lacretelle, Lamartine et ses amis. 



160 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

essential contributions to the lyric evolution of that 
school. He was of old Eoyalist family, and had the 
education of a Catholic noble. After the Eestoration 
he entered the army, which he soon exchanged for 
the diplomatic service, though not until he had pub- 
lished the " Meditations, " — verses that accorded less 
with the profession of arms than with the weary tem- 
per of this time of exhaustion, the to-morrow of Water- 
loo. Its success showed how completely it expressed 
the state of mind of cultured France. Forty -five thou- 
sand copies were sold in less than four years. That 
Lamartine was happily married in 1822, and busied 
with diplomacy till 1830, seemed rather to foster than 
check his sentimental melancholy. After the Eevolu- 
tion of July,- he made a journey to the Orient, and 
returned in 1833 to take an active part in politics, 
where his oratory earned him distinction, and his gen- 
erous though unpractical patriotism won him esteem. 
In 1848 he withdrew from the Eepublic, of which he 
had been the quickly discredited chief, and passed his 
last years in indigence, relieved toward the close by 
the generosity of the Imperial government which he 
had opposed. 

Lamartine' s poetry belongs almost wholly to the 
early period, and is, as he himself says, a direct result 
of the study of De Stael, to whom he owed more than 
any other Eomanticist. It is usually lyric in form, 
almost always so in sentiment. It deals with the 
relations of man to an idealized Nature rather than to 
his fellow-men. Indeed, Lamartine has but one note, 
and that not an inspiring one. His verses preserve much 
of the verbal mannerisms of the former generation; 
they flow in an ever-broadening and somewhat shallow 
stream, from the " Meditations" to the diffuse epic 



THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 161 

parables of " Jocelyn " and the " Angel's Fall. " It is 
hard for the modern reader to realize, still harder to 
comprehend, the ardent admiration that hailed each 
succeeding volume; for, great as is the bulk of his 
verse, his message was all in his first poems, and 
gained nothing by repetition. He was a noble-minded 
but melancholy and somewhat sickly idealist, nursed 
in the school of Eousseau, who in early life had no 
crosses to stir his vigor ; and when these came in later 
years, they discovered none to stir. So at his best 
" he touches but does not penetrate the heart, " and at 
its worst his sentimentality is nauseating. He ac- 
knowledges himself " incapable of the exacting labor 
of the file and of criticism ; " so, while his verses flow 
as naturally as the gentle rain from heaven, their ethe- 
real mushiness drowns the germs of healthy realistic 
action. True passion never descended to such depths 
as " My letter is not ink, but written tears, " or " These 
verses fell from my pen like drops of evening dew. " 
Eeal suffering has a different throb from the rhythmic 
pulsation of his " Laments, " and his smug " Medita- 
tions " provoke in our day more exasperation than 
sympathy. 

But in 1820 the French people were weary and 
heart-sick, and none appealed to them as did Lamartine. 
He brought home to the heart of cultured France the 
hazy religiosity of Chateaubriand and the equally hazy 
Nature-worship of Eousseau ; and while there was in 
the public this mood to comprehend him, Lamartine 's 
popularity was secure. But when this mood yielded 
to a more energetic spirit, the poet soon sank to the 
place of a writer whom few read, though all conven- 
tionally admire. After the collapse of his political 
fortunes, he seems to have felt, what others had felt 

11 



162 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

long before, that his poetic vein was worked out. And 
his later work suffered from the speed with which he 
was constrained to produce it. " Graziella " and other 
short tales are graceful, but weak ; the " Voyage en 
Orient " is too rhetorical, and the " History of the 
Girondins " is both declamatory and demagogic. Yet 
Lamartine still merits serious study, less for what he 
is to any group of readers to-day than for what he was 
to a former generation, — the most complete reflection 
of their sentiments and aspirations. 

A sturdier man in every way, and in his earlier 
poetic period more in sympathy with the spirit of 
Eomanticism, was De Vigny, 1 distinguished not only 
in poetry but also in the drama and in fiction. He was 
of a military family, and, like Lamartine, connected 
with the army from 1815 to 1827, — twelve years of 
piping peace that seem to have disgusted him with 
the profession. He was already an author of good 
report, and emancipated from material cares by a 
wealthy marriage, when he published his first volume 
of poems, two years after Lamartine 's " Meditations. " 
This book is valuable intrinsically, but its importance 
to the evolution of French poetry lies in three poems, 
— " La Neige, " which is the first grandiose poetic 
evocation of the middle ages, and " Le Cor, * written 
at Roncesvalles during the Spanish war (1823), which, 
with " Mo'ise, " is the first attempt in French to treat 
philosophic subjects in epic and dramatic form. 

1 Born 1799 ; died 1863. Poetry : Poemes, 1822 ; Poemes antiques et 
modernes, 1826 ; Les Destinees, 1864. Prose : Cinq-Mars, 1826 ; Stello, 
1832 ; Servitude et grandeur militaires, 1835 ; Journal d'un poete, 1867. 

Criticism : Brunetiere, Poesie lyrique, ii. 3 ; Litterature contem- 
poraine, 31 ; Faguet, xix. siecle, 124; Paleologue, De Vigny (Grands 
ecrivains francais) ; Dorison, De Vigny, poete philosophe, and De 
Vigny et la poesie politique ; Sainte-Beuve, Portraits contemporains, 
i. 326, and Nouveaux lundis, vi. 



THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 163 

The epic " Eloa, " that followed in 1824, was more 
in the tone of Lamartine, and doubtless served as a 
model for his "Angel's Fall." Here the heroine, a 
sister of the angels, born of a tear of the Saviour, falls 
from her native grace by a sympathy so universal as 
to embrace even the Spirit of Evil. The style of this 
poem, as of the earlier " Moise " and " Le Deluge, " 
shows the influence of the young Hugo, but reacted 
with greater power on that poet's later manner; while 
" Dolorida, " another short narrative in verse, inspired, 
like " Le Cor, " by his Spanish campaign, seems to 
have left its impress on De Musset's youthful 
" Contes d'Espagne et d 'Italia " 

The Eevolution of 1830 produced essential changes 
in De Vigny's genius; and his small posthumous vol- 
ume, " Les Destinies," reveals him at the height of 
his power as a lyric pessimist and philosophic poet 
who felt his function to be " to represent thoughts, 
epic, philosophic, dramatic. " So, in a sense, he 
became a " Symbolist, " from whom the school of that 
name have learned much and might learn more. Espe- 
cially in " Le Mont des oliviers " and " La Maison du 
berger, " there is a purposeful objectivity, a grappling 
with the problems of life, as they present themselves, 
old foes with new faces, to our century, more vigorous 
than would have been looked for in the author of 
* Eloa. " But the general note of these " Philosophic 
Poems " is gloomy skepticism, with desperate exhorta- 
tions to self-reliance, since there is nothing else on 
which to rely. 

At first his changed mood found expression in the 
drama and in fiction, that will claim our attention pres- 
ently. After 1835 he published nothing, wrapping 
his pessimism in a stern silence, taking for himself 



164 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

the rule of " Stello " to separate the poetic from the 
political life, since " the application of ideas to things 
is but time lost for the creation of thoughts. " 

This self-contained calm contrasts strangely with the 
eager utterance of the inner circle of the Eomanticists. 
With him, as with his Chatterton, " continual revery 
killed action. " * He has been said thus to occupy a 
middle ground between De Musset and Chdnier; but 
his thoughtfulness, somewhat chilling at times, sug- 
gests rather Madame de Stael, and artistically he has 
much in common with Chateaubriand, though he is 
more coldly impersonal and probably much more sin- 
cere in his pessimism, — if indeed the morbid senti- 
ment of " Ken£ " should be dignified with the name of 
pessimism at all. 

If we may trust De Vigny's " Journal " and his 
posthumous poems, Nature seemed to him " a tomb, " 
where it was the part of wisdom " to respond with a 
cold silence to the eternal silence of God. " 2 " Peaceful 
despair is true wisdom, " he says elsewhere. " Good 
is always mixed with evil ; evil alone is pure and 
unmixed. " " Extreme good is ill, extreme ill never 
good ; " while " hope is the source of all cowardice. " 
So broods this self -tormentor, who " loves the majesty of 
human sufferings, " — a verse that he declares to be " the 
sense of all his philosophic poems. " To him the real 
is less l*eal than the symbol, the seen than the unseen. 
" The dream is as dear to the thinker as all that he 
loves in the actual world, and more terrible than all 

1 Curiously enough, unhappy love, the very cause of the fecundity 
of Lamartine and De Musset, was the reason of his silence. See 
Paleologue, pp. 89-105. 

2 Le juste opposera le dedain a l'absence, 
Et ne repondra plus que par un froid silence 
Au silence eternel de la divinite. 



THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 165 

that he fears. " His very genius seems to him a fatal 
gift; glory only "immortalizes misfortune." His 
Joshua is "pensive and pale," because he is God's 
elect; his Moses, " mighty and solitary. " If at times, 
under the cruel deceptions of love, he seemed to lose 
faith in his idealism, his pessimism remained always 
noble, restrained, sympathetic, manifesting itself not 
in appeals for condolence but in pitying care of all 
who were near and dear to him. But this lofty poetry, 
interpenetrated with the stern despair of pessimistic 
idealism, will always be unintelligible to the many. 
As a poet, De Vigny appeals to the chosen few alone. 
In his dramas his genius is more emancipated from 
himself; in his novels, most of all. It is by these 
that he is most widely known, and by these that he 
exercised the greatest influence on the literary life of 
his generation. But his philosophic poems will be 
his monument, cere per ennius, when all else shall be 
forgotten. 

Lamartine and the young De Vigny stand on the 
threshold of Bomanticism. With De Musset we are 
in its full efflorescence. No poet ever announced his 
advent with more of the genial sense of youth than he. 
" He makes his entry with a bright song on his lips, 
spring on his cheeks, his eye candid and proud, smil- 
ing at existence, the elect of genius and affianced to 
love. " 1 His is the poetry of Nature, — that gushing of 
simple passion that mocks all rule and " sings of sum- 
mer in full-throated ease, " or quivers with the pain of 
his heart's reopening wounds. But to this rich blos- 
soming of his spring-time there came an early autumn 
and a long winter. At thirty De Musset was already 
an old man seeking in artificial stimuli the fountain 
1 Pellissier, Mouvement litteraire au xix. siecle. 



166 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

of a youth that would not spring again. The zeal of 
his house had eaten him up; his passion had burned 
itself out and burned out his heart with it. He had 
done his work; it mattered little to literature or to 
him whether the curtain had fallen on his life's drama 
in 1841 or in 1857. 

A Parisian, born in 181 0, 1 of noble and cultured 
family, he was a most precocious and excitable child 
and a wayward youth. He printed his first volume in 
1829, and his last of note in 1841. During this brief 
interval he produced many lyrics of the highest value, 
dramatic work of quite peculiar charm, and stories 
worthy to rank with the best of that brilliant decade. 
More than any of his fellows, he was a poet by inspi- 
ration, not by art. He sang " because he must ; " he 
was a law to himself. His sportive genius even went 
out of its way to ridicule or to offend " the rhyming 
school that cares only for form. " It would seek, or 
at least it would not shun, irregularities, solecisms, 
and venturesome similes, of which the famous com- 
parison of the moon to the dot on an i is only an 
easily quotable example. 

In this, as in much else, " De Musset was a child 

1 Died 1857. Chronology of the principal works — Poetry: Contes 
d'Espagne et d'ltalie, 1830; Rolla, 1833; Les Nnits, 1835-1837. Dra- 
mas : Caprices de Marianne, 1833 ; Lorenzaccio, Fantasio, On ne badine 
pas avec l'amour, 1834 ; Le Chandelier, 1835 ; II ne faut jurer de rien, 
1836. Fiction: Confession d'un jeune homme du siecle, 1836; Contes, 
1837-1844; La Monche, 1853. The sixteen years, 1841-1857, show 
two or three lyrics of the first rank, several good dramas and stories, 
but nothing that marks growth. 

Criticism: Brunetiere, Poesie lyrique, i. 257, and Epoques du 
theatre francais, 349 ; Faguet, xix. siecle, 259 ; Barine, De Musset 
(Grands ecrivains francais) ; Paul Lindau, Alfred de Musset (Berlin, 
1876); Palgrave, Oxford Essays; Sainte-Beuve, Portraits contem- 
porains, i. 397. 



THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 167 

all his life, and a spoiled child. " Extreme in all 
things, he would work excessively, only to yield more 
completely to utter idleness and his lower nature. 
Like Eousseau, and all who have nursed themselves 
in hypersensitiveness, he suffered acutely from self- 
deception and disillusionment. So, in the spirit of 
Eomantic devotion, he accompanied George Sand to 
Italy (1834), only to be tortured by an estrangement 
(1835) that lay in the nature of things and cost her 
few pangs, while it marks the cardinal point in his 
career. 1 Here lay his power, but also his weakness. 
" Strike the heart, " he said ; " genius lies there. " To 
bare his heart, to display his emotions, is with him in- 
stinct rather than design. Hence his power of inven- 
tion is not strong. He was no thinker, like De Vigny ; 
but he painted wonderfully what he had felt subjec- 
tively, and what he felt supremely was the hollow 
worthlessness of the only love he knew. Love and 
passion were the Alpha and Omega of his life. In his 
" Confession " he says : " I did not conceive that one 
could do anything but love. " If, now, such a nature 
is possessed by egoistical skepticism, genius will not 
save the man, though it may the work. Faust's 
" eternal womanly " has no power to draw such souls 
upward and on. It drew De Musset, as it has others 
whom we shall meet, to intellectual and moral decay, 
of which the successive steps can be traced in his 
dramas and his lyrics. 

His first work, " Les Contes d'Espagne et d'ltalie, " 
shows reckless daring in the choice of brutal subjects 
of crime and debauchery, quite in the spirit of Le Sage, 

1 She made it the subject of a novel, " Elle et lui," which provoked 
"Lui et elle," an indignant reply, from De Musset's brother Paul. 
The matter is fully and impartially treated by Barine, pp. 57-90. 



168 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

with much freshness and brio, and a dash of dandified 
impertinence in verses that mocked the foibles of the 
older Eomanticists, and suggested to his contempora- 
ries the Byron of " Don Juan. " But he repelled the 
flattering comparison. " My glass is not large, but I 
drink from my own, " he said. However, he presently 
abandoned this style for the more subjective strain of 
" Les Voeux stdriles " and " Eaphael, " and for the decla- 
mation of " Namouna " and " Eolla, " both very eloquent 
at times, though fundamentally immature. Already 
he is playing with the passionate fire that, after the 
separation from George Sand, will fill his heart with 
the throbbing passion of " Les Nuits, " which, with 
the " Ode to Malibran " and the " Letter to Lamar- 
tine " (1836), mark the highest point of his lyric 
development, — a time of sad but in the main sober 
resignation, that had overcome the spirit of revolt, and 
had not yet yielded to the lethargy of debauchery. 

Even his second volume had shown the overflowing 
confidence of youth a little checked by experience. 
In " Eolla, " one of the strongest and most depressing 
of all his poems, the skeptic regrets the faith he has 
lost the power to regain, and realizes in lucid flashes 
the desolate emptiness of his own heart. And the 
same note that has here a brazen ring sounds with 
more subdued sadness in the four " Nuits " and in 
" Espoir en Dieu. " l For De Musset had not the cour- 
age to follow his aspirations. Seeds of disease, fos- 
tered by a wild and reckless life, sapped his will even 
while his genius still shone bright. But if his lyric 
production grows more sparing and in form less 
Eomantic, occasional outbursts, such as " Le Ehin 
allemand, " show that at times he could still gather 

1 "Rolla" is dated 1833 ; the "Nuits," 1833 to 1837 ; "Espoir," 1838. 



THE EOMANTIC SCHOOL. 169 

up all his powers. Yet, in the next years, both the 
lyric and the drama were laid aside for prose fiction, 
to which we shall recur presently. He resumed the 
drama, in 1845, with the charming " II faut qu'une 
porte soit ouverte ou fermee ; " but the comedies that 
followed were far below his earlier standard. His 
lyric work had now almost wholly ceased, and one 
is more than once tempted to wish it had ceased 
altogether. 2 

It was of the nature of Eomanticism to encourage 
the most varied individualization. It might be hard 
to find in literature a more radical divergence than 
that of De Musset and Gautier; for just as one was, 
in Leconte de Lisle 's contemptuous phrase, the " show- 
man " of his heart's emotion, so the other was a con- 
scious artist, objective in aesthetics as in morals, 
judging his work from the intellectual side, enjoying 
his art for its own sake. t It is more true of Gautier 
than of any considerable French poet, that he seems to 
write for the sake of writing, for the joy that he finds 
in the art of manipulating the language. 

Born in Provence, Gautier 2 was educated at Paris, 

1 The chronology of the "Contes" is: Emmeline, 1837; Deux mat- 
tresses, Frederic et Bernerette, Fils du Titien, Margot, 1838 ; Croisilles 
(his best), 1839; Merle blanc, 1842; Mimi Pinson, 1843; Pierre et 
Camille, 1844; La Mouche, 1853. 

2 Born 1811; died 1872. Poetry: Poesies, 1830; Albertus, 1832; 
Comedie de la mort, 1838 ; Emaux et camees, 1853. Fiction : Les Jeunes 
France, 1833 ; Mademoiselle de Maupin, 1835 ; Fortunio, 1838 ; Roman 
de la momie, 1856; Capitaine Fracasse, 1861-1863; Spirite, 1866. 
Travel: Tra los montes, 1843 ; Zigzags, 1845; Italia, 1852; Constanti- 
nople, 1854; Loin de Paris, 1864; Quand on voyage, 1865; Russie, 
1866; L'Orient, 1876. Criticism: Les Grotesques, 1844; Histoire du 
romantisme (written in and after 1830). 

See Du Camp, Theophile Gautier; Baudelaire, (Euvres, iii. 151; 
Brunetiere, Poesie lyrlque, ii. 41, and the literature there cited. 



170 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

and at first gave himself to painting, cultivating a 
literary taste by much reading, especially in the rich 
literature of the sixteenth century, in Marot and the 
Pleiad, — a training to which Sainte-Beuve attributed 
the sureness of his metrical touch. He was led by 
these studies to write critical essays that attracted 
some attention; but his literary advent dates from 
1830, when his first volume appeared in the midst of 
a political revolution. Although his verses won him 
the praise of Hugo, and admission to the Cdnacle, yet 
his work remained chiefly critical. He made him- 
self the centre of a school of ultra Eomanticists, the 
flamhoyants, as they were wont to call themselves, 
who with long hair and flaring waistcoats delighted 
to provoke the impotent rage of the grisatres and per- 
ruques, the greybeards and periwigs, as they called the 
belated adherents of Classicism. Under his leadership 
this band of artists, musicians, and struggling writers 
fought the battles of emancipation in more than one 
Parisian theatre with an enthusiasm of which he has 
left a delightfully humorous account in his so-called 
" Histoire du Eomantisme. " 

Presently this battle ceased for lack of combatants ; 
and the irony of fate made Gautier for a time secre- 
tary to the novelist Balzac, a post that must have 
been inconceivably uncongenial to one of his tastes 
and temperament. He soon abandoned it, but the 
discipline was not without influence on his future 
novels. Then, as soon as better fortune permitted, 
Gautier travelled gladly and widely. He visited 
Spain, Algeria, Italy, Constantinople, and Eussia, 
and made from his experiences books that are classics 
in the picturesque literature of the world. Meantime 
a few dramatic attempts had only reminded him of the 



THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 171 

limitations of his genius. His novels and tales are 
more interesting, and perhaps most read ; but it is his 
poetry that gives him his prominent place in the lit- 
erary evolution of the century. 

In all his work one is impressed first and most by 
his extraordinary love of beauty and by his wonder- 
ful power of language. Then one notes that he is 
radically differentiated from the Romantic and possi- 
bly from the true lyric spirit by the objective soulless- 
ness of his poetry, by what Brunetifere calls " its lack of 
personal sensation or conception. " And finally, as one 
reviews his work, one finds him shrinking everywhere 
from the ugly, especially as symbolized in death, and 
yet ever morbidly recurring to it in the midst of the 
joys of sense, — a thing not uncommon with our modern 
literary hedonists. It is just here that these men miss 
the classical note. In vain they emulate the careless 
joy of Theocritus or Anacreon. They cannot efface 
their Christian birthmark ; they cannot be or act as 
though it were not. They may close, as Gautier did 
during the Eevolution of 1848, their shutters to the 
world and its sympathies, until they see in a Belgian 
landscape only " an awkward imitation of Ruysdael, " 
until form alone comes to have meaning and value, and 
the poet does not punctuate his manuscripts, that noth- 
ing may disturb the worship of his fetish words ; yet 
a vein of iconoclastic bitterness always mars the stat- 
uesque repose. In the struggle against environment 
the cultus of art for art is apt to become one of art for 
artificiality, a snare that even Hugo did not wholly 
avoid. Gautier came to attach signification not only 
to the meaning and sound of words, but to their very 
vowels and consonants, though he never descended to 
the freaks of the modern Symbolists. As he said 



172 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

himself of one of his characters, " he lived so much in 
books and painting that he ended by finding Nature 
herself no longer true ; " and while he was dividing 
this cummin-seed, the intrinsic interest of his sub- 
ject and even its moral bearings became indifferent to 
him. Formal beauty was all in all. 

From the first, the precision of his verse attracted 
the keen ear of Sainte-Beuve. " There is a man who 
carves in granite, " he said of the " Tete de mort " in 
1829. Gautier's first long poem, " Albertus, " may re- 
sist and hardly repay analysis ; but as a series of weird, 
vivid, fantastic pictures, the orgy at Beelzebub's court 
and the gallows-humor of the close are quite worthy of 
that sixteenth century from which he drew his inspi- 
ration. This was a freak of strong but morbid im- 
agination, and the " Comddie de la mort, " suggested 
perhaps by the " Ahasvdrus " of Edgar Quinet, shows 
preoccupation with the same gloomy subject. In this 
poem of uncanny fascination, life in death and death 
in life are exhibited in a series of brief but impressive 
pictures. The worm talks to the bride who died on her 
wedding-day, and prints the first kiss on her lips ; the 
skull of Eaphael tells the poet of the fair Fornarina ; 
Faust has discovered that living is loving, and Don 
Juan that virtue is the solution of the world's mys- 
tery ; Napoleon regrets that he did not rather " sport 
with Amaryllis in the shade " than conquer the con- 
tinent. One and all speak of lost illusions, but no- 
where in this poem of death is there a hint of life 
beyond the grave. 

Gautier had, however, another string to his lyre. 
His " Paysages et interieurs " are charming pictures 
of the cheerful side of life and of natural beauty. 
But he regards nature more in its exterior aspect and 



THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 173 

less in its relations to man than Lamartine or Bous- 
seau would have done. And this is true also of the 
" Emaux et canides, " poems as delicate and as cold as 
their title suggests. Not even the toys of a dead 
child will persuade the poet to do more than paint 
with an infinitely delicate brush a picture that may 
work its own way to the heart. 

Never was poet so wrapped up in his art, so bent on 
catching the outward form, so indifferent to the spir- 
itual meaning of things ; and his most zealous disci- 
ples have been most eager to imitate his limitations. 
And yet, in the vagaries of the new individualism, it 
was well for the future of French poetry that these 
masterpieces of elaborate correctness should be set 
for an example before others who had that love of 
humanity without which the best poetry is but a 
sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. That touch of 
Nature was best represented among the Eomanticists 
by the righteous indignation of Barbier's " Iambes, " 
— satires on the ignoble side, social and political, 
of the generation that came to the front with 
Louis Philippe. Eomanticism, being in its essence 
lyric, naturally revived satire; and the "Iambes" 
awaited their equal till Hugo's " Chatiments " en- 
larged the borders and deepened the bitterness of 
poetic wrath. 

But though lyric poetry was the natural stronghold 
of Eomanticism, general agreement made the drama 
the battle-ground between the conservatives and the 
reformers. All the members of the C^nacle, whatever 
the bent of their talent, joined in this attempt to 
carry the war into the heart of the enemy's country. 
Here Classicism was most strongly intrenched ; here 
the old rules had been most strictly enforced; here 



174 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

the effect of the new liberties could be most plainly 
seen; here the public could pronounce an immedi- 
ate and unmistakable verdict; here alone, at least 
in France, could literary propagandism be effectually 
prosecuted. 

The classic stage certainly invited, almost cried for, 
reforms that the innovators of the eighteenth century 
had not been able to secure. In 1820 De B^musat 
remarks the disgust of audiences for dramas in classic 
form. It seemed to him " as though all means of 
causing emotion had lost their effect People recog- 
nized them and were weary of them. " Some drama- 
tists had already attempted, and some critics, among 
them Lemercier and Stendhal, had preached a return 
to natural methods, and preferred Shakspere to Eacine. 
There was indeed little absolutely new in the dramatic 
theories elaborated by the critics of the " Globe, " and 
proclaimed in Hugo's preface to " Cromwell " with an 
eloquent daring that found an echo in De Vigny's in- 
troduction to his translation of " Othello " (1829). But 
they were the first to make effective the demand for a 
deeper and fuller study of character, for individuals 
in place of types ; they first announced their readiness 
to exchange the classical indefiniteness of time and 
place, that befitted the enunciation of universal truths, 
for dramatic illusion in elaborate reproductions of local 
and temporal conditions. But for this the historical 
drama offered the best excuse and opportunity. Their 
aim was to specialize and diversify what the Classi- 
cists had generalized. To do this, they were obliged 
to extend the time of the dramatic action beyond the 
single day that might suffice for the already formed 
characters of Eacine. The " unity of place " was even 
more easily abandoned, and " unity of action " yielded 



THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL 175 

to unity of interest. 1 No one has stated this better 
than De Vigny. The new drama, he thinks, should 
deal with long periods of time, entire lives. The 
characters are to be introduced with only the germs of 
the passions from which the tragedy is to grow, and 
destiny is to be shown gradually enveloping its vic- 
tims. All is to be as in life. There are to be no 
messengers, as with the Greeks and Eacine. Action 
is to take the place of talk about action. The Roman- 
tic aspiration is to present " a whirl of events ; " Hugo 
desires " a crowd in the drama. n 

In their zeal for " local color, " the Eomanticists had 
had predecessors as radical as they ; but they were 
led by it to a further step of great importance. 
The tragic dialogue of the Classicists is all pitched on 
one key. The slave, if he does not actually use the 
language of the emperor, must at least be dignified. 
Even in comedy Boileau reproaches Molifere with 
travestying his characters. But now each person was 
to talk in the language of his station, at least so far 
as the still obligatory alexandrine admitted, though 
lyric measures were allowed for passion and distress, 
and royalty might at times appear, as Lemercier puts 
it, " en ddshabilld. " The public could have asked 
more, but it seems to have welcomed this instalment 
of liberty. 

The Eomanticists made no pretence of desiring 
dramatic realism. To their minds " an impassable 
barrier separated reality according to art from reality 
according to Nature " (De Vigny). On the stage all 
effects were to be heightened, magnified. The noble 
should be sublime, the ugly grotesque. They knew 

1 For the predecessors of the Romanticists in these liberties, see 
Brunetiere, fipoques du theatre francais, p. 319. 



176 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

that such exaggeration tended back to the Classical 
types, but they hoped to maintain a middle ground of 
idealized reality. So while the Eomantic movement 
proclaimed a radical revolution, it ended in a moder- 
ate reform. Indeed, in some of its phases, especially 
in the essentially lyric intrusion of the personality 
of the author, it was less realistic than the Classical 
drama itself. 

In this field Hugo is greatest, Dumas most popular. 
This latter, who was also the most fertile and widely 
read of the Eomantic novelists, united the blood of an 
innkeeper's daughter and of a general, himself the son 
of a marquis and of a Creole. He sustained the tradi- 
tions of his family by marrying an actress, though 
his well-known son was an illegitimate child. The 
family of young Dumas were poor, and he was sent in 
1823 to seek his fortune in Paris, where indeed he 
speedily found it; for in six years he achieved a 
dramatic success that made him one of the most pop- 
ular writers of his generation. He had begun with 
stage trifles, but was roused to more serious efforts by 
the visit of the English actors in 1827. He then 
wrote " Christine," one of his very few dramas in verse, 
which he alleges would have been acted at the national 
Theatre Francjais in 1828, had it not been for a cabal. 
As it was, his " Henri III.," in vigorous prose, produced 
in February, 1829, was the first successful drama 
on the new lines ; and though the author lacked the 
prestige of De Vigny to win critical recognition for his 
theories, he did what De Vigny had failed to do, — he 
carried his audience by storm, and gained a financial 
success till then unrivalled in the history of the 
stage. 

" Henri III." had certainly the vigor of overflowing 



THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 177 

genius, a contagious love of life and action, a boundless 
fertility of invention, that were thoroughly character- 
istic of the author. It mattered little to the public 
that his historical studies were of a very " impres- 
sionist " nature, and, as he said himself, " a mere nail 
to hang his pictures on." To them it mattered little, 
either, that critics found fault with his psychology or 
with his notions of mine and thine. The crowd was 
pleased, and paid its money cheerfully. Yet " Henri 
III." has less literary value than any drama of Hugo, 
less than De Vigny's " Chatterton," or several of De 
Musset's comedies ; but it educated a public which, 
because it had been educated, ceased to care for it. 

The Eevolution of July followed, and Dumas' first 
drama after it is the malodorous " Antony," where the 
historic thread is dropped for a romance of modern 
life, that Dumas may graft on the tree of literature 
the vigorous shoot of illicit sexual relations that has 
borne such varied dead-sea fruit in succeeding genera- 
tions. " Antony " is an apology for adultery and a de- 
fence of suicide. Its success was more one of sensation 
than of esteem, and the author returned to the histori- 
cal drama, to attain in " Le Tour de Nesle " (1832) the 
ne plus ultra of sentimentalism and his greatest popu- 
lar triumph, though hardly one of which he had cause 
to be proud, since some of its most telling effects had 
been borrowed without acknowledgment. He followed 
this with a considerable number of sensational dramas, 1 
but was gradually diverted to the more profitable field 
of prose fiction, though his inexhaustible fecundity 
never quite abandoned the stage. But he could not 

1 The best are Kean, 1836 ; Paul Jones, 1838 ; Mademoiselle de Belle- 
Isle, 1839; Un Mariage sous Louis XV., 1841 ; Les Demoiselles de 
Saint-Cyr, 1843. 

12 



178 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

equal his early efforts in this genre, which, though far 
from great, were most useful in popularizing Romantic 
ideas among those whose pecuniary aid was a condition 
of material success. 

De Vigny's " More de Venise," which dates from the 
same year as " Henri III.," was the most faithful 
translation of the great English dramatist that France 
had yet seen ; and so it served as a powerful plea for 
masculine vigor and directness of speech, as opposed to 
the weak conventionalism of Soumet and Delavigne. 
A veritable tempest raged over Desdemona's "hand- 
kerchief." So vulgar a word shocked the conservatives, 
who would have had it called a "tissue," and pro- 
tested loudly against this defilement of the poetic 
vocabulary, as they did also against some metrical 
liberties with the alexandrine muse, that seemed little 
less than sacrilege to the disciples of Boileau. 

In " Othello " De Vigny had violated too many prej- 
udices to win great success ; and his little comedy that 
followed, " Quitte pour la peur," hardly deserved any. 
Nor can his " Mardchale d'Ancre " claim notice, except 
as the introduction to his study of the age of Louis 
XIII. that was soon to produce " Cinq-Mars." The 
dramatic strength of De Vigny centres in " Chatter- 
ton " (1835), a plea for poetic idealism that com- 
mands admiration though it is too pessimistic to be 
enjoyed as a work of dramatic art. The play was drawn 
from his own " Stello," and was in prose, till then 
rarely used in tragedy ; but in the mouth of the Eng- 
lish boy-poet De Vigny has placed speeches that lack 
nothing but the form of pure poetry. To the Lord- 
Mayor who cavils at the uselessness of the poet in 
the ship of state, Chatterton replies with a noble flash, 
" The finger of the Lord points the course ; he reads 



THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 179 

it in the stars." 1 So far, however, as Chatterton could 
read the celestial signs in his own case, they pointed 
to suicide, by which his pride thought to avenge itself 
on society for its disdain. Perhaps this very morbid 
pride was what attracted De Vigny to the subject. 
But his treatment of it is very powerful, and keeps the 
play alive to-day, though, as Sainte-Beuve remarked, 
"it touched the nerves rather than the heart." In 
those days nerves were certainly more delicate than 
now. We read that at its climax " there was a cry of 
horror, of pity and enthusiasm. The audience rose 
and remained standing for ten minutes ; the men clap- 
ping, the women waving their handkerchiefs." But 
De Vigny probably perceived the limitations of dra- 
matic Eomanticism too clearly to seek to follow up his 
tragic success. 

De Musset was of equal and higher dramatic origi- 
nality. 2 It is unfortunate that his first play, " Les 
Nuits v^nitiennes," should have fallen before a well- 
organized opposition exasperated by the recent success 
of Hugo's " Hernani ; " for by this he was diverted from 
the stage, though he had more genuine dramatic talent 
than any other member of the school. This first essay 
showed his complete accord with the fundamental 
Eomantic conception that tragedy must mingle with 
comedy on the stage as in life ; but with him mingling 
was not juxtaposition but interpenetration, and he 
had too delicate a taste to yield to the extravagances 
of Dumas and the lesser Eomanticists. Nursing his 
genius on the study of Shakspere, and writing for the 
publisher rather than the stage, his work shows con- 

1 Act III. scene 6. 

2 See especially Lemaitre's preface to Jouast's edition of De Musset's 
Theatre, and also Brunetiere, Epoques du theatre francais, 357. 



180 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

stant progress from the " Storm and Stress " of " A 
quoi re vent les jeunes filles" and (i La Coupe et les 
lkvres" to "Fantasio," " Lorenzaccio," and " Les Ca- 
prices de Marianne," the only one of these comedies 
that is still frequently acted. Here, as in his essay 
"De la trag^die" (1838), he refuses absolute allegiance 
to the Romantic or Classical principles, and seeks by a 
judicious eclecticism to combine the outward appear- 
ance of restraint with the new liberty to associate the 
weird and terrible in human life with its higher comic 
aspects, as had been done by Shakspere. 

De Musset, perhaps more than any other contempo- 
rary dramatist, certainly more than any of his French 
predecessors, understood the presentation of complex 
characters, especially of such as illustrated the con- 
tradictions of his own nature. To this power he 
added a ready wit, and made his plays sparkle with 
dialogue unequalled since Beaumarchais. But, though 
nearly all this work was done between 1833 and 1835, 
it had no immediate effect on the development of dra- 
matic art, for none of these plays were acted till 1848, 
and they did not establish a definite place on the stage 
till the later years of the Second Empire. From about 
1865 their influence can be traced as a corrective to the 
excessive naturalism of the school of Balzac, — a vindi- 
cation of the rights of fancy to roam with the airy, trip- 
ping grace and elegance that make the charm of the 
Italian Eenaissance, of the sonnets of Petrarch, the 
comedies of Marivaux, and the undiscovered country of 
Watteau's shepherds. In this De Musset showed more 
real originality and a truer dramatic genius than De 
Vigny or Hugo. Two or three of his comedies con- 
tain the quintessence of Bomantic imaginative art, 
and will probably hold the stage longer than any 



THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 181 

other dramatic work of this school. They show most 
and best the unchecked freedom of fancy which joined 
with the spirit of realistic comedy to produce the mod- 
ern French drama. 1 

In prose fiction, as in the drama and in poetry, the 
distinctive characteristic of Eomantic work is its sub- 
jectivity and its unbridled imagination, both of which 
show themselves in the historians and critics of the 
movement, but are naturally most marked in the 
novelists, who from this time become more and more 
the dominant element in French literary life. All the 
Eomanticists of whom we have spoken — Hugo, Gautier, 
De Vigny, Dumas — are more widely known and more 
generally prized to-day for their prose fiction than for 
their verses ; though, except in Dumas' case, these are 
of far higher literary value. 

In "Cinq-Mars " De Vigny gave French literature 
its best historical novel, which he based on a most 
minute study of more than three hundred volumes, 
while he vivified all with a flight of fancy and sweep 
of narration that he never equalled. In his concep- 
tion of the romance he owed much to Walter Scott; 
and he might have profited still more from him, for 
while " Cinq-Mars " is an excellent piece of picturesque 
imagination, it is exceedingly poor history. It is vivid, 
dramatic, delicate in details, firm in delineation, or 
perhaps one should say distortion, of character. For 
neither Eichelieu, nor his secretary Joseph, nor De Thou, 
nor King Louis, is true to history ; and they are hardly 
more true to human nature. They seem rather chang- 
ing masks than mobile faces; types, personifications, 
rather than men. But, with all its faults, " Cinq-Mars " 

1 Cp. Brunetiere, Epoques du theatre francais, p. 348. 



182 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

remains a very brilliant study of a critical period in the 
social and political life of France. . 

De Vigny wrote also little biographical tales of Gil- 
bert, Chatterton, and Chdnier, — three poets " snatched 
away in beauty's bloom," — and a group of military 
stories, "Servitude et grandeur militaires," of great 
nobility and pathos. Here he spoke of a career that 
he knew both by experience and family tradition. 
The self-abnegating heroism of the soldier had a pecu- 
liar charm for his stern temperament ; and he dwelt 
with affection on the glory and pathos of military life 
at a time when almost every Frenchman had shared 
the thrills of the victories and the gloom of the defeat 
of their great emperor. " Here," says a kindred spirit, 
John Stuart Mill, "the poem of human life is open 
before us, and M. de Vigny does but chant from it 
in a voice of subdued sadness . . . the sentiment of 
duty to its extremest consequences." There is remark- 
able artistic restraint in " Le Cachet rouge," a bit of 
psychology from the Reign of Terror ; and the chapter 
in "La Canne de jonc" that describes the meeting 
of Pope and Emperor is the stylistic gem of a book 
that will rank very high among the rhetorical master- 
pieces of France. 

De Musset's prose occupies more space than his 
lyrics or his dramas; but it has far less value, and 
owes its chief significance to the clearness with which 
it exhibits the progress of his ethical disintegration. 
In "Emmeline" we have a rather dangerous juggling 
with the psychology of love. Then follows a study 
of simultaneous love, " Les Deux, maitresses," quite in 
the spirit of Jean Paul. Three sympathetic excur- 
sions into Parisian Bohemia follow, 1 and then "Le 
1 Frederic et Bernadette, Mimi Pinson, Le Secret de Javotte. 



THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 183 

Tils de Titien " and " Croisilles," carefully elaborated 
historical novelettes ; the latter overflowing still with 
Eomantic spirits, and contrasting strangely with " La 
Mouche," one of the last flickerings of his imagination. 
"Margot" bears marks of George Sand, and "Le Merle 
blanc " is a sort of allegory of their rupture, based on 
the Ugly Duckling of the nursery. Finally, " Pierre 
et Caniille" is a pretty but slight tale of dea:f-mute 
love. 

More ambitious but less interesting is De Musset's 
" Conf ession," the immediate result of his unhappy 
Italian experience. It shows even in 1836 whither 
the shrinking from all moral compulsion and self- 
control was leading him. He sees his ethical weak- 
ness, but attributes it, perversely enough, to the spirit 
of an age made sick by Napoleon, whose fall had " left 
a ruined world for a generation weighted by care," who 
"struggled to fill their lungs with the air he had 
breathed." " During the Empire, while husbands and 
brothers were in Germany, anxious mothers brought 
into the world an ardent, pale, nervous generation." 
Thus De Musset would account for his own lack of 
will ; but surely it was rather the spacious times of 
the Empire that left the impulse of their energy on 
the literary men of a generation of which Hugo is 
more typical than De Musset. His talent appears to 
more advantage in later critical essays, especially the 
witty letters of Dupuis and Cotonet, that satirize 
modern marriage, the journalists, the novelists, and 
especially the critics of thoroughbred Eomanticism. 
Indeed, he does not fail to send a few Parthian shafts 
even at the high-priest of the movement, — at Hugo 
himself. 

As in poetry, so here, the sharpest contrast to De 



184 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

Musset is Gautier, to whom in fiction as in verse form 
is the paramount interest, while psychology is subor- 
dinated or suppressed. In the whole range of his 
work there is not one clearly drawn character ; and were 
it not for the dreary, muddled efforts of Mademoiselle 
de Maupin's Albert to explain himself, one might say 
there was no attempt at one. This was in some degree 
true of De Musset ; but Gautier's tales lacked the in- 
vention, feeling, and emotional intensity of the other's 
work, good or bad. It has been said that his novels 
start from nothing, and end where they began. He 
enters the field with "Les Jeunes France," stories 
mildly satirizing the vagaries of his own school, freaks 
of luxuriant fancy in which we miss a single touch of 
nature. Nor shall we find it in the frankly hedonistic 
" Mademoiselle de Maupin," 1 exquisite in style, but so 
ostentatious in its disregard of moral conventions as to 
close the Academy forever to one who would surely else 
have won a distinguished place among those " Immor- 
tals." More in the playful satyr vein of " Les Jeunes 
France" is "Fortunio," which he calls "a hymn to 
beauty, wealth, and happiness, the sole trinity that we 
recognize." But the hymn is not inspiring. His 
Fortunio is so cold, so selfish, that the reader cannot 
sympathize with the gentle Musidora's devotion, still 
less with her despairing suicide. There is a taste of 
dead-sea fruit in Gautier's feast. "Vanity of vani- 
ties" is the real, though unexpressed, moral of this 
book. 

And yet in 1863 Gautier writes : " 'Fortunio' is the 

1 Du Camp (Gautier, p. 140) says that Mademoiselle or rather 
Madame de Maupin was an historical character, who sang at the 
Paris Opera, went through a large part of Europe in male attire as an 
adventuress, and died in 1707 in a convent at the age of 44. 



THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 185 

last work in which I have freely expressed my true 
thought. From that point the invasion of cant and 
the necessity of subjecting myself to the conventions 
of journalism have thrown me into purely physical de- 
scription." For the next twenty-five years the great 
bulk of his work was in artistic, dramatic, and literary 
criticism, uncongenial but remunerative. He had be- 
gun such work some years before with critical essays 
on the " Grotesques " of the sixteenth century, whom 
lie had treated with genius, insight, exaggeration, and 
inaccuracy. He had also written contemporary criti- 
cisms of Hugo and others who " answered to Hernani's 
horn." But in 1836 he became a staff-critic of "La 
Presse," and later of the official "Moniteur" and 
u Journal ; " and to these he contributed some two thou- 
sand articles, 1 wasting precious genius on work that 
was inevitably ephemeral. But from this constant 
drudgery he snatched time to compose and polish the 
most perfect of his poems, and to write short stories 
where fancy could supply his lack of sustained imagi- 
nation. Among these the best are "Avatar," a weird tale 
of the transmigration of souls ; " Jettatura," a tragedy 
of the evil eye ; and " Arria Marcella," a phantasmagoria 
of revived Pompeii. The phantom love that inspired 
"Albertus" reappears in "Omphale," in "The Mummy's 
Foot," "The Opium Pipe," "La Toison d'or," and, above 
all, in "La Morte amoureuse," which in form is one of 
the most perfect tales in the language. He attempted 

1 See their titles in Spoelberch de Louvenjoul, Histoire des 
oeuvres de T. Gautier, 1887. Of this journalistic work Gautier 
himself says regretfully, — 

O poetee divins! je ne suis plus des votres, 

On m'a fait une niche, ou je veille, tapi 

Dans le bas d'un journal, comme un dogue accroupi. 



186 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

archaeological fiction also in " Le Soman da la momie,* 
but for this he had hardly an adequate equipment. 

More congenial to his genius, and surely his most 
charming prose work, is " Le Capitaine Fracasse," which 
he justly calls " a bill drawn in my youth and redeemed 
in middle life," for it shows all his youthful verve 
mastered by the mature artist. We are transported to 
the fascinating times of Louis XIII., to ruined castles 
and bands of strolling actors, for which Scarron's 
" Eoman comique " may have served as prototype, and 
to the Paris of the Eenaissance, which furnishes the 
book's most brilliant chapters. Finally, in his last novel, 
" Spirite," Gautier returned once more to phantom love, 
and by a skilful appeal to the skeptical credulity of 
the time, won a success more rapid, more widespread, 
but less lasting and less deserved, than attended " Fra- 
casse " or " Fortunio." 

In his fiction as in his verse Gautier will satisfy in 
no subject that calls for human sympathy or insight 
into character ; but wherever an exquisite power of 
vision upborne by a vocabulary of boundless resource 
and unrivalled delicacy of shading will suffice, wherever 
the plastic alone is demanded, wherever the author 
may be artist, he is almost without a rival. And it 
should be noted that this limitation in creative power 
was helpful to him in criticism, where he could apply 
his delicate sense of the beautiful to fix and define the 
merits of others, to explain and reconvey their charm ; 
hence, too, his descriptions of travel are among the 
most marvellous word-pictures in any language, and 
would be among the masterpieces of literature if ut 
pictura poesis were not a false canon of criticism. 

Nearly allied to Gautier in early friendship, in liter- 
ary labors, in his virtues and his short-comings, was 



THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 187 

Gerard de Nerval, 1 whose translation of Faust the 
aged Goethe loved to read. In delicate elaboration 
his short tales rival all but the best of Gautier. " Les 
Femmes du Caire," a brilliant description of Egyptian 
life from "Scfenes de la vie orientale" (1848-1850), is 
still popular. Equally deserving and more curious are 
the "Contes et faceties" (1856) and " La Boheme ga- 
lante " (1856), whose vivid but disordered imagination 
suggests a mind not wholly sound. Indeed, after his 
return from a journey to the East, he suffered from 
several attacks of insanity, and died at last by his own 
hand. 

If we review the whole production of the Eoman- 
ticists from 1830 to 1840, there will appear a marked 
tendency to turn from the lyric to the drama and from 
the drama to fiction. This is seen in Hugo, in De Vigny, 
in De Musset, and in Gautier, but most of all in that 
frank vender of his pen, Alexandre Dumas. In 1830 
this enfant terrible had suddenly abandoned the drama 
for a frolicsome run in the political field, and seems to 
have thoroughly enjoyed the bustling days of the July 
Ee volution, of which he tells the most incredible 
adventures, — how, like a true ancestor of Daudet's 
Tartarin, he made a desperate march on Soissons, and 
captured with unaided but resistless courage — a pow- 
der-magazine ! And some grain of truth must under- 
lie the tale ; for when the tempest calmed, he had in 
some way earned the distrust and forfeited the favor 
of Louis Philippe. This might have led him to look 
to a literary field less under the control of the political 
police ; but his work continued wholly dramatic till 

1 Born 1808; died 1855. Cp. Eckermann's Conversations with 
Goethe, Jan. 3, 1830. Berlioz used Nerval's translation for his "Dam- 
nation of Faust." 



188 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

the reckless plagiarism of " Le Tour de Nesle " in- 
volved him in a duel, and made a Swiss tour expe- 
dient, during which he kept pen and scissors busy 
with " Memoires de voyage," — exceedingly diffuse, but 
enlivened with such a flow of spirits as to be still 
good reading for an idle hour. 

Then, beginning with " Isabelle de Bavikre " (1835), 
he poured out in ten years more than a hundred vol- 
umes of romance; but his great fame dated from 
" Monte Cristo " (1841-1845), a story perhaps more 
universally known than any other in modern fiction. 
Remarkable in any case, it becomes astonishing when 
it is considered that it was published as it was written 
from day to day in a newspaper, so that Dumas had 
no opportunity for revision or elaboration. This de- 
vice, popular on the Continent, for securing two prices 
for one book, did not originate with Dumas. Sue had 
already adopted it for his sensational and anti-Jesuit- 
ical tale, " Le Juif errant ; " but the success of " Monte 
Cristo " made it a journalistic habit, so that no 
French daily is now complete without its half-dozen 
columns of fiction " below the line." This has been a 
financial gain to authors, and has increased the number 
of readers, but it has been of doubtful aid to literature. 
All men have not the ready invention of Dumas. 
Writing with the " copy-boy " at their elbow has 
injured the work of many, even perhaps of the very 
greatest, of modern French novelists. Yet in the 
case of " Monte Cristo " it is difficult to see how time 
or elaboration could have added to its unfailing verve, 
its inexhaustible fertility of resource, the vraisem- 
Uance that never abandons even its wildest freaks of 
fancy, and the tension of its interest, which is ever 
rousing an expectation that it never disappoints. A 



THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 189 

half-century still waits for its equal as a romance of 
plot and incident. 

" Monte Cristo " was followed, or rather accompa- 
nied, by the hardly less excellent " Three Guardsmen," 
perhaps in its construction the still unrivalled model 
of the romance of adventure. After such successes 
Dumas claimed the rights of a favorite, and became 
for some years a sort of chartered libertine of the 
press, certain that whatever he wrote or was sup- 
posed to write would bring him readers and large 
returns. He poured out volumes with astonishing 
speed, and his income from copyright during this 
heyday of his fame was not less than 200,000 francs 
a year. But he spent this and more in semi-bar- 
barous luxury, and, that production might not slacken, 
he supplemented his own pen by a system of organ- 
ized collaboration that is probably unique in literary 
history. In 1844, in the flush of his success, he 
had made contracts to furnish within a year more 
than the most skilled penman could possibly have 
written. Hence he was forced to the questionable re- 
sort of " inspiring " two secretaries, from whom there 
was developed a novel-bureau, where Dumas furnished 
little but the plot and the titlepage. f Not content 
even with this, he ventured to offer to the public the 
most impudent compilations and plagiarisms. Thus he 
was able to produce fifty or sixty volumes a year, and 
some twelve hundred in all, while, in regard to the 
greater part of them, there is no certainty that he had 
so much as read their contents. But though, even as 
early as 1847, these methods were unsparingly exposed, 
yet his touch, whenever he did put his hand to the 
work, was so admirable that wherever it was felt the 
fame and life of the book were secure. 



190 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

The years that preceded the Second Eepublic mark 
the summit of his genius. They count " La Eeine 
Margot," " Vingt ans aprfes," and " Le Vicomte de 
Bragelonne," all tales of seventeenth-century life with 
which his dramatic studies had given him superficial 
familiarity. But presently this popularity turned his 
head, and filled him with a notion of his importance, — 
a megalomania that would be laughable if it were not 
sad. He built himself a huge theatre and a palatial 
castle. In 1846, when by dint of impudence he had 
secured from the government a commission to "write 
up " Algeria, then a new colony, he did not scruple to 
turn the transport that was to convey him there into a 
pleasure-yacht, and so to visit at the public expense 
Carthage, Tunis, and other places that he thought he 
could exploit with his pen. The government, however, 
was less long-suffering than the public ; publishers too 
began to take umbrage ; lawsuits multiplied in his path, 
and the Bevolution of 1848 crowned his misfortunes 
with a partial eclipse of popularity. From this time 
on, his attempts to attract public attention, if not es- 
teem, such as his association with Garibaldi in 1860, 
served only to draw on him the ridicule of the thought- 
ful, — a ridicule that yielded to pity as it grew clear that 
his fertile brain was giving way as his moral nature had 
already done. 

His friend the critic Jules Janin thus summarizes 
his genius : " A mind capable of learning all, forgetting 
all, comprehending all, neglecting all. Bare mind, 
rare attention, subtle spirit, gross talent. Quick com- 
prehension, execution barely sufficient, an artisan rather 
than an artist. Skilful to forge, but poor to chisel, and 
awkward in working with the tools that he knew so 
well how to make. An inexhaustible mingling of 



THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 191 

dreams, falsehoods, truths, fancies, impudence, and 
propriety ; of the vagabond and the seigneur, of rich 
and poor. Sparkling and noisy, the most wilful and 
the most facile of men ; a mixture of the tricky lawyer 
and of the epic poet ; of Achilles and Thersites ; swag- 
gering, boastful, vain and — a good fellow." Quite a 
unique figure even among the vagaries of Eomantic 
genius, of which he is the supreme type, he left imita- 
tors but no successors. He died in 1870, poor, but re- 
lieved from want and tenderly cared for by his son, a 
man of equal talent and greater probity. 

All the novelists of this generation partook more or 
less of the Eomantic spirit. Traces of it can be found 
in Mdrimde, and it dominates a large section of the 
work of Sand and Balzac, though these must be ranked, 
with Stendhal, as the founders of Naturalistic fiction. 
It was in the nature of Eomantic " individualism " and 
"liberty" that the limits of its sway should be ill- 
defined, — that even the same writer should seem at 
one time wholly under its influence, and at another 
quite independent of it, or, like Gautier, subtly under- 
mining its power. For the two decades that preceded 
the Eevolution of 1848 every writer that led, every 
reader that welcomed, the advent of literature in new 
fields, the opening of new paths, was a Eomanticist. 
In the advance they had the cohesion of a common 
impulse and a common enthusiasm ; but for construc- 
tive effort this cohesion failed. Each struck out on his 
own path, and all but the supreme genius of Hugo 
were pushed aside at last by the Naturalistic wave. 



192 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 



CHAPTEE VI. 

THE YOUNG HUGO. 

Victor Hugo is incomparably the greatest French 
writer of his century, and, except for Goethe, perhaps 
the greatest of our time. His first volume appeared in 
1822 ; his literary activity continued till his death, in 
1885, and has been prolonged beyond it by posthumous 
volumes. Thus for nearly two-thirds of the century 
he was a leader in French literature, and for the greater 
part of that time he was pre-eminently the leader. But 
since he represents the supreme effort of an egoistical, 
individualistic movement, it is only by examining in 
some detail the circumstances and changing fortunes 
of his career that his character or his work can be 
appreciated. 1 

1 Born in 1802. Poetry: Odes, 1822 and 1826; Orientales, 1827; 
Feuilles d'automne, 1831 ; Chants du crepuscule, 1835 ; Voix inte- 
rieures, 1837 ; Les Rayons et les ombres, 1840 ; Les Chatiments, 1853; 
Les Contemplations, 1856 ; La Le'gende des siecles, I., 1859 ; Chansons 
des rues et des bois, 1865; L'Annee terrible, 1872; La Legende des 
siecles, II. and III., 1877, 1883; L' Art d'etre grand-pere, 1877 ; Quatre 
vents de l'esprit, 1881. Drama: Cromwell, 1827; Hernani, 1830; 
Marion de Lorme, 1831 ; Le Roi s'amuse, 1832 ; Lucrece Borgia, Marie 
Tudor, 1833; Angelo, 1835; Ruy Bias, 1838; Les Burgraves, 1843. 
Fiction: Han d'Islande, 1823; Bug-Jargal, 1825; Dernier jour d'un 
condamne, 1828; Notre-Dame de Paris, 1831 ; Les Miserables, 1862; 
Les Travailleurs de la mer, 1 866 ; L'Homme qui rit, 1 869 ; Quatre- 
vingt-treize, 1874. Political: Napoleon le petit, 1852; Histoire d'un 
crime, 1877 ; Actes et paroles, 1875-1876. 

Criticism: Brunetiere, Poesie lyrique, i. 181, ii. 75; Faguet, xix. 
siecle, 153 ; Dupuy, Y. Hugo, l'homme et le poete, and Y. Hugo, son 
ceuvre poetique ; Renouvier, Y. Hugo, le poete ; Duval, Dictionnaire 
des metaphores de Y. Hugo. See also the literature cited in Lanson, 
p. 1027. 



THE YOUNG HUGO. 193 

He himself has summed up in familiar lines the con- 
dition of Europe and his own at the time of his birth. 
" Boine," he says, " was replacing Sparta " in the French 
Eepublic. " Napoleon was already appearing beneath 
Bonaparte ; the forehead of the emperor was breaking 
in many a place the narrow mask of the First Consul. 
Then in Besangon, an ancient Spanish city, there was 
born, of Breton and of Lorraine blood, a child without 
color, sight, or voice; so weak that like some fairy 
thing he was abandoned by all save his mother. This 
child whom Life was effacing from her book, who had 
not even a to-morrow to live, is I." l This climax is 
noteworthy and characteristic, for Hugo never doubted 
that it was a climax, nor that what was happening to 
him was of primary importance to humanity. Note- 
worthy, too, is the site of his birth. Spain finds an 
echo, not only in his early work, but in the whole 
character of his thought. And his parentage united 
significant elements. His father had been a soldier, 
and, as Hugo tells us, one of the first volunteers of 
the Eepublic ; while his mother was a Vend^an, who, 
as her son tells us, " when a poor girl of fifteen, had 

1 Ce siecle avait deux ans! Rome remplacait Sparte, 
Deja Napoleon percait sous Bonaparte, 
Et du premier consul, deja par maint endroit 
Le front de Tempereur brisait le masque etroit. 
Alors dans Besancon, vieille ville espagnole, 
Jete comme la graine au gre de Fair qui vole, 
Naquit d'un sang breton et lorrain a la fois, 
Un enfant sans couleur, sans regard et sans voix; 
Si debile, qu'il fut, ainsi qu'une chimere, 
Abandonne de tous, excepte de sa mere . . . 
Cet enfant que la vie effacait de son livre, 
Et qui n'avait pas meme un lendemain a vivre, 
C'est moi. 

(Feuilles d'automne, I.) 
13 



194 ' MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

fled through the forests, a brigande, like Madame de 
Bonchamp and Madame de Bochejacquelin." This 
however is, to speak charitably, a mirage of Hugo's 
imagination, for in fact she was the daughter of a sea- 
captain at Nantes, and her future husband had made 
her acquaintance there while serving gallantly in 
Vendue amid scenes that inspired many episodes in 
his son's novel " Quatre-vingt-treize." Later he dis- 
tinguished himself in Italy, Corsica, and Spain ; but 
these years were passed by Victor with his mother in 
Paris, until in 1811 General Hugo summoned his 
family to join him in Madrid, where he had risen to 
high rank in the service of King Joseph. 

A year had hardly passed before the French cause 
grew desperate in Spain, and the General was con- 
strained to send his family back to Paris again ; but 
the months that he had spent there left an ineffaceable 
mark on the impressionable mind of the boy. That 
strange people filled him with the spirit of romance. 
"Spain showed me its convents and bastiles, " he 
says ; " Bourgos, its cathedrals with their gothic spires ; 
Irun, its roofs of wood ; Vittoria, its towers ; and thou, 
Valladolid, thy palaces of families proud of the chains 
that rust in their courtyards. My recollections budded 
in my heated heart ; I went about singing verses with 
a subdued voice, and my mother, watching in sepret all 
my steps, wept, smiled, and said, ' A fairy speaks to 
him w\hom we see not.' " * From the first to extreme 

1 L'Espagne me montrait ses couvents, ses bastilles ; 
Burgos, sa cathedrale aux gothiques aiguilles ; 
Irun, ses toits de bois : Vittoria, ses tours ; 
Et toi, Valladolid, tes palais de families, 
Fiers de laisser rouiller des chaines dans leurs cours. 
Mes souvenirs germaient dans mon ame echauffee, 
J'allais chantant des vers d'une voix etouffee ; 



THE YOUNG HUGO. 195 

old age, Hugo's work bears unmistakable marks of this 
year in Spain. His first dramatic success, " Hernani," 
and his last dramatic poem, " Torquemada," recall 
Spanish towns at which the convoy halted on his re- 
turn ; and a deformed servant whom he met and feared 
at his convent school in Madrid reappears in his novels 
as Habribrah, as Quasimodo, and as Triboulet. 1 

From the winter of 1812 till the fall of the Empire, 
Victor was with his mother in Paris, living in Les 
Feuillantines, an abandoned convent that reappears in 
" Les Misdrables." The Eestoration caused some 
estrangement between General Hugo, who had de- 
fended Thionville with desperate heroism against the 
Allies, and his wife, always a Catholic and now a de- 
clared Eoyalist, who breathed more freely under the 
Bourbons. Victor was sent to school, unwillingly 
it seems, for he recalls with passionate tenderness the 
happiness of his home nurture in the mystic associa- 
tions of the old convent and its beautiful garden. 
"Woods and fields make the education of all great 
minds," he said ; and this free life " made blossom every- 
where in my nature that pity for mankind, sad result 

Et ma mere en secret observant tous mes pas, 
Pleurait et souriait, disant : C'est une fee 
Qui lui parle et qu'on ne voit pas. 

(Odes et ballades, V. ix. 3.) 
A very full account of Hugo's life up to 1843 is " V. Hugo raconte 
par un temoin de sa vie," practically an autobiography, in which the 
author, unlike the Charles V. of his " Hernani," " se regarde toujours 
en beau." He never found it easy to tell the truth about himself, at 
least consecutively, as has been pitilessly demonstrated by Bire, V. 
Hugo avant 1830, and V. Hugo apres 1830 (2 vols.). 

1 Hugo describes him as "a humpbacked dwarf, with a scarlet 
face, tight-curled hair, in a red linen vest, with blue plush breeches, 
yellow stockings, and russet shoes." Many lyrics, especially among 
the " Orientales," are of purely Spanish inspiration. 



196 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

hidden beneath so many causes, that comes to us from 
the contemplation of existence." * In any case the boy 
had suffered no great loss by delay, for he speedily 
distinguished himself at school, and was already busy 
with poems, — " follies before I was born," as he called 
them in later years. Among these was an epic of 
Roland of Roncesvalles, who was to inspire some of 
the noblest verses of the " L^gende des sifecles." Then 
there was a " Ddluge " in Miltonic style, as well as 
plentiful sketches of tragedies, melodramas, and comic 
operas. Forced by his father to technological studies 
that he abhorred, he wrote in his diary at fourteen, " I 
wish to be Chateaubriand or nothing," — a sentiment 
that marks at once his ambition and his epoch. 

While still at school and but fifteen, Hugo competed 
for an Academic prize with a poem on " The happiness 
that study procures in all situations of life." Hono- 
rable mention was awarded to his three hundred verses ; 
and thus, though subordinated to the not very illus- 
trious Loyson and Santine, he won the notice and 
patronage of some Academicians who assisted his liter- 
ary beginnings. Of far greater influence on his devel- 
opment, however, was his growing affiliation with the 
group of young and enthusiastic aspirants to fame who 
formed the Cdnacle of 1824. It was under their stimu- 
lus that he wrote his first novel, " Bug- Jargal," though 
he did not cast his lot fully with them till 1826. The 
story was afterward remodelled ; but even in its boyish 

1 Et les bois et les champs, du sage seul compris 
Font l'education de tous les grands esprits ! . . . 
Et nous ferons germer de toutes parts en lui 
Pour l'homme, triste effet perdu sous tant de causes, 
Cette pitie qui nait du spectacle des choses. 

(Les Rayons et les ombres, xix.) 



THE YOUNG HUGO. 197 

form * it shows the promise of some of his most strik- 
ing qualities. It has the same close juxtaposition of 
the tragic and the grotesque that is found in his later 
work ; the same love of the moth for the star that is 
the mainspring of " Kuy Bias " and " Notre-Dame ; " the 
same chivalrous honor that summons Hernani to his 
death ; and a generous share of those " moving accidents 
by flood and field, of hairbreadth 'scapes in the immi- 
nent deadly breach, of being taken by the insolent 
foe/' and of the vivid descriptions attendant thereon, 
that mark " Les Mis^rables " and " Quatre-vingt-treize." 

The scene of " Bug-Jargal " is Hayti; the time the 
insurrection of the Blacks in 1793 ; the hero a negro 
prince and slave, whose magnanimous heart is won by 
the blue-blooded charms of Marie, the daughter of a 
wealthy planter and soon to be the wife of D'Auverney, 
an officer, and the narrator of the tale. To rescue her, 
even for his rival, this chivalrous African devises nu- 
merous feats of self-sacrificing heroism, and crowns all 
by giving his life for his love. But of more interest 
than this sentimental slave is the negro kinglet Biassou, 
the savage chief of the rebels, and the villanous dwarf 
Habribrah, whose weird end as he is swept away in the 
torrent of a cavernous abyss is a masterpiece of Ko- 
mantic imagination, worthy to take a place beside the 
famous fight with the devil-fish in " The Toilers of the 
Sea." 

But during these early years the tendency of Hugo's 
talent is toward lyric poetry rather than fiction. In 
1819 he won three prizes at the Jeux Floraux of Tou- 
louse, — annual poetic competitions, such as are still held 
in Wales ; and his odes were of such intrinsic merit as 
to win him the epithet " sublime child " from Soumet, 

1 Reprinted in "V. Hugo raconte'," ii. 181-223. 



198 MODEKN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

or, as he liked to think, from Chateaubriand himself. 1 
Thus encouraged, the young author, in spite of very slen- 
der resources, abandoned his technological studies, and, 
while ostensibly studying law, co-operated in founding 
a literary journal, " Le Conservateur littdraire," a strange 
title for the herald of Eomanticism. But though this 
venture came at an auspicious time and had the sup- 
port of the rising genius of Lamartine, he was soon 
obliged to abandon the costly experiment. A few 
months later his mother died. Then his father, dis- 
gusted that he should have abandoned his profession, 
withdrew his allowance ; and between losses and dep- 
rivations the young poet was reduced for a year to 
considerable straits, which were the harder to bear as 
he was impatient to marry Adfele Foucher, a child- 
friend of the Feuillan tines. Eeminiscences of these 
gloomy days and of a duel in which his atrabilious stub- 
bornness had involved him linger in the Marius episodes 
of " Les Mis^rables " and in the duel of " Marion de 
Lorme." 

He had now a book of odes ready for the press ; 
but no publisher would take it, even as a gift, and he 
could not afford to print it at his own expense. It was 
due to the generosity of his brother Abel that " Odes 
et poesies diverses" appeared in 1822. The book paid 
expenses, and left the author some seven hundred francs. 
But it did much more than that, for it attracted the 
attention of King Louis, who liked to think himself a 
patron of letters, and accorded the author a pension of 
two thousand francs. With this and hope Victor mar- 
ried Adkle in October, 1822 ; and his courage was jus- 
tified by a domestic life happy and unclouded to its 
close. 

1 V. Hugo raconte, ii. 235. 



THE YOUNG HUGO. 199 

These early poems show Hugo's strength and weak- 
ness, but each in a still undeveloped form. He could 
not have heralded his future career as a writer better 
than by such brilliantly rhetorical lyrics, for both the 
lyric and the rhetorical strain ran through all his epics, 
his dramas, his satires, and his prose. And in these 
very first notes the youth of twenty shows that he 
knew already both what he wanted to do and how he 
proposed to do it. " He would put the movement of 
the ode in ideas rather than in words," he said ; that 
is, he would prefer harmony between thought and 
metre to symmetry of form, neglect of which was the 
corner-stone of the Eomantic "liberties." But in his 
case Genius was justified of her child. His verses sing 
themselves to the attentive ear with a happy concord 
of sound and sense, and a richness of rhythmic melody 
that till then had been approached only by the "Medi- 
tations" of Lamartine. Then, too, following in the steps 
of Chateaubriand, Hugo discarded mythology, with all 
its apparently antiquated apparatus, and made his ap- 
peal to those religious sentiments, universally under- 
stood and generally shared, that Boileau had thought 
incapable of poetic treatment. But Hugo went further 
than Chateaubriand. " Poetry," he declares in his 
preface to the Odes of 1822, is "that which belongs to 
the inner nature of all things." This definition made 
his work subjectively individualistic, sometimes with 
more artificiality than sincerity ; and though we see 
now that lyric poetry is in its nature subjective, this 
position challenged in the France of 1822 a tradition 
venerable by two centuries of abused power. However, 
the verses of this first volume hardly illustrated the 
new position, and in their metrical form there was little 
to attract the criticism even of strict Classicists. 



200 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

These odes breathe the ardent royalism that he had 
learned at his mother's knee, and an equally ardent but 
less clearly defined Catholicism, — partly also an inheri- 
tance from the brigande of Nantes, partly no doubt 
a convention necessary for a young man who would 
be " Chateaubriand or nothing." In " La Lyre et la 
harpe " x he opposes Christian poetry to pagan quite as 
the " Genius of Christianity " had done ; his " Liberty " 2 
is that in which Christ has set us free, and he has some 
not wholly perfunctory praises of chastity and martyr- 
dom. He tells us that " his songs fly toward God as 
the eagle toward the sun, for to the Lord I owe the 
gift of speech." But, after all, one detects less dignity 
and true feeling here than in the poems that throb with 
political passion, always intense in Hugo through all 
the kaleidoscopic changes of his life. Perhaps the high- 
water mark of these first odes is in the closing stanzas 
of " Buonaparte ; " but he soon surpassed himself in 
"Les Deux iles " (1825), and the superb Ode to the 
Vendome Column written in 1827 is one of the finest 
pieces of his earlier manner. 3 But the Christian odes 
not only lacked the majesty of these political verses, 
they lacked also the warm tenderness of the domestic 
poems and recollections of childhood, 4 which deepened 
with the birth of his daughter Leopoldine (1826), and 
remained one of Hugo's most sympathetic and popular 
traits. 

A year after the first odes were printed, Hugo again 
ventured on journalism in the short-lived f< Muse 
Frangaise." He had also completed a novel, but it 
was so very Eomantic that for the present he pre- 
ferred anonymous publication. This was " Han d'ls- 

1 Odes iv. 2. 2 Odes ii. 6. 

8 Odes i. 11 ; iii. 6, 7. * For instance, Odes v. 9, 12, 17. 



THE YOUNG HUGO. 201 

lande," of which he said truly that the only thing 
in it based on personal experience was the love of a 
young man, and the only thing based on observation 
the love of a young girl; that is to say, it was the 
immediate literary result of his betrothal and mar- 
riage. But for the rest, and the greater part, Hugo 
drew on the fountain of imagination that had flowed 
so freely in " Bug- Jargal." The scene is laid in far 
Norway, where Hugo had never been, and the central 
figure is a monster such as Hugo had never seen. 
Han, even less human than Biassou, consorts with a 
polar bear, who assists the energies of his double brain 
to the destruction of a regiment that has offended him. 
Here, as in " Bug-Jargal," there is vivid imagination, 
with skill in the narration of scenes of terror and feats 
of breathless daring; but both stories are differen- 
tiated from the mere tale of adventure by a grotesque 
humor that gives them a marked individuality. On 
the other hand, the pathos is forced and ineffective ; 
but the same might be said of all such efforts in this 
generation, which exhibited its emotions with what 
seems to us a morbid delight. 

Hugo's creative imagination reappears, as free and 
vigorous but more refined and chastened, in the " New 
Odes and Ballads" of 1826. Here first he allied him- 
self openly with the Bomanticists, attacked the cur- 
rent and we may add fundamental restriction of the 
genres, and demanded " liberty in art/' — whatever that 
may mean. In practice it seems to have amounted 
to the emancipation of his lyric individuality. His 
versification and rhythm already begin to echo his 
personality, 1 and several poems show the beginnings 

1 E.g., "Le Pas d'armes du roi Jean" and "La Chasse du 
burgrave." (Ballades xi., xii.) 



202 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

of that sympathetic study of the mediseval mind that 
is associated with Komanticism. 1 

Hugo now held the first place among the younger 
poets. The king had increased his pension, and made 
him a member of the Legion of Honor, and by 1827 
all recognized in him the standard-bearer of the move- 
ment. This leadership he asserted and confirmed by 
his first drama, " Cromwell," and especially by its 
elaborate preface, full of dramaturgical observations 
more opportune than new, for they had been timidly 
taught by Lemercier in France, were already recog- 
nized in England as essential elements in the Shak- 
sperean drama, and had been deduced with convincing 
logic by Lessing for the German stage. But if the pref- 
ace to " Cromwell " was not original, it was very fruit- 
ful, and it was moreover the best piece of French prose 
that the century had yet produced, although the dog- 
matic emphasis that wraps startling assertions in an 
endless train of brilliant metaphors does not always 
suffice to hide the writer's superficiality or even some- 
times his ignorance. 

The kernel of this eloquent outburst appears to be 
that literature had outlived the lyric and epic forms 
and had reached the age of the drama, which, because 
it was more true to nature, had greater power to move 
and sway the hearts and minds of men. As a matter of 
fact, we know that precisely the contrary was true, - — 
that the Eomantic movement was essentially lyric, 
and that the century has been pre-eminently lyric in 
its verse and epic in its prose ; but Hugo thought " the 
drama the only complete poetry of our time, the only 
poetry with a national character." To give this " com- 
plete poetry " scope, the stage must have larger liberty, 
1 E. g., " Une Fee " and " La Ronde du sabbat." 



THE YOUNG HUGO. 203 

especially in subject; the tragic and comic must be 
mingled, and the grotesque placed beside the sublime 
should show, as in Shakspere, the irony of destiny. 
He did not aim, as La Chauss^e had done in the eigh- 
teenth century, at a fusion of the genres but at an 
alternation, and so far as this tended to make the in- 
terest centre in character, he followed Diderot, though 
perhaps unconsciously. He made an effective plea 
also for the extension of the tragic vocabulary, the 
results of which have been already noted. He never 
departed, however, from the fundamental conventions 
of the stage, and those who hailed the " brute and 
savage nature " of his realism did him an injustice. 
His drama is quite as far from that of the new 
Naturalists, and much farther from a natural drama 
than the tragedies of Racine or the comedies of 
Moliere. 

For Hugo was never a dramatist ; he was a lyric 
poet who wrote dramas. The psychological develop- 
ment of his characters is extremely weak. Antithesis, 
pushed to the verge of credibility and even over it, is 
the only complexity that they possess, and the minor 
personages have not even that factitious interest. 
The action seems in constant danger of stranding, and 
is indeed kept afloat only by the heroic measures that 
we associate with the melodrama. It is a little sur- 
prising, after the oracular declarations of the preface, 
to find " Cromwell " timid in its treatment of the 
unities of time and place, which are subordinate, and 
rash only in casting away the fundamental unity of 
action. The scene is confined to thirty-three hours and 
to London. Such unity of action as the play possesses 
hangs about the question, Will the Protector be 
King? a question posed in Act L, affirmed in Act II., 



204 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

denied in Act III., reaffirmed with hesitation in Act 
IV., and denied in Act V. 

Swinburne's somewhat hysterical admiration declared 
this play " sufficient to establish the author's fame for 
all ages in which poetry and thought, passion and 
humor, subtle truth of character, stately perfection 
of structure, facile force of dialogue, and splendid 
eloquence of style continue to be admired and en- 
joyed." 1 But surely the judicious reader — if haply 
readers of " Cromwell " can be called judicious — will 
see in this huge mass, whose length, though not that 
alone, excluded it from the stage, no masterpiece 
of any kind, but rather the first essay of a man of 
genius who has felt the power of Corneille and Shak- 
spere and attempts an imitation of their processes. 
Indeed, whole scenes recall passages in "Hamlet," 
" Julius Caesar," and " Macbeth ; " and the would-be 
Corneillian style is often antiquated and forced, while 
occasionally it falls to the level of the mock-heroic. 
What is most interesting to note here, in the evolution 
of the drama, is the great number of persons brought 
on the stage contrary to French tradition, as well 
as the cultivation of " local color," which though, as 
usual with the Eomanticists, untrue to fact, is vivid 
and successfully maintained. 

But in this very year the "Ode to the Vendome 
Column " should have shown Hugo that his strength 
and that of Eomanticism lay in lyric poetry. It struck 
the key-note of the best work of his prime, and it 
showed also that the glories of the Napoleonic legend 
were beginning to dispel the prejudices of a Eoyalist 
nurture and the teachings of sober reason. Provoked 
by an insult to the marshals of Napoleon, it was 
1 Victor Hugo, p. 11. 



THE YOUNG HUGO. 205 

written while his blood was at white heat ; but if the 
ode bears marks of emotion, it bears none of haste. 
Such lines as those that prophesy how " Venclde shall 
sharpen its sword on the monument of Waterloo/' or 
recall how Germany bears printed on its forehead 
" the sandal of Charlemagne, the spur of Napoleon," x 
had been till then approached only by Corneille. And 
this ode is no isolated flight, though before Hugo had 
completed another volume of lyrics he turned once 
more to the drama and produced " Amy Kobsart," a 
play taken from an episode in Walter Scott's " Kenil- 
worth," which failed on the stage and was not printed 
till many years later. He wrote also " Marion de 
Lorme," which the censorship would not suffer to be 
either acted or printed, thanks to a fancied allusion to 
the then reigning Charles X. ; and so it happened that 
" Cromwell " was followed not by works that only the 
fame of their author preserves from oblivion, but by 
"Les Orientales," one of the most original of all his 
volumes of verse, — a collection that Brunetifere called 
"the gymnastics of a talent in training, studies in 
design, color, and speed ;" while Swinburne pronounced 
it "the most musical and many-colored volume that 
ever had glorified the language," though the careful 
reader will not seldom find the mark of Eomantic 
artificiality where he sought the mint-stamp of genuine 
poet-gold. 

Hugo's Orient is that of Byron and Ali Pasha, but it 

1 Tout s'arme, et la Vendee aiguisera son glaive 
Sur la pierre de Waterloo 



L'histoire . . . 

Montre empreints aux deux fronts du vautour d'Allemagne 
La sandale de Charlemagne, 
L'eperon de Napole'on. (Odes, III. vii. 4.) 



206 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

is also the Moorish Orient of Spain, some breath of 
which lingered in his recollections of childhood ; most 
of all, however, it is the Orient of his imagination. On 
the whole, the Spanish pieces are the truest and best ; 
but "Les Djinns," the most remarkable single poem 
in the volume and one of the most striking pieces of 
metrical art in the world, is more Turkish than Mau- 
resque. " Le Voile," too, an Albanian tale of jealous 
family honor, is astonishingly brilliant in its render- 
ing of a purely fictitious local color. But in " Voeu " 
and in " Sara la baigneuse " there is a plaintive delicacy 
and a luxurious joy of girlish life that strike a more 
realistic Spanish note. As a piece of riotous fancy, the 
ode " Fire in the Sky," a dance of Sodom and Gomor- 
rah whirling to damnation, surpasses in terror as it 
does in art the prose of " Han " or of " Bug-Jargal." 
Very striking and with a touch of philosophic sym- 
bolism is " Mazeppa," borne away in a rush of des- 
tiny on his fiery horse, as a youth by his genius, 
but overcoming and conquering at last. Yet these 
w T ord-pictures are fruits for whose enjoyment the 
foreigner must strive and climb. Let us pass to 
that which, though less exquisite, hangs on lower 
branches. 

The " Orientales " were followed by " Hernani," a 
drama not often acted, but still read by all who care 
for the history of the stage or for French literature, 
because it marks the triumph of Eomanticism, — a 
triumph extorted from the Bourbon dynasty only a 
few months before they went hence to be seen no more. 
" Hernani," as has been said, was not the first Romantic 
drama, but it stood for a principle, as Dumas ' " Henri 
III." had not done. The story of the conflict over it 
has often been told, but by none more graphically than 



THE YOUNG HUGO. 207 

by Gautier, its protagonist. 1 The play had been ac- 
cepted by the Theatre Frangais in October, 1829 ; but it 
took nearly six months to overcome the opposition of 
individual prejudice and Academic tradition. Delay 
only heated the passions of both sides ; and it was with 
confident though calculating generalship that Hugo 
published his determination to employ no claque of 
hired applauders, for by this he made the play a stand- 
ard of battle around which every Eomanticist might 
fight for the cause of individual emancipation. He 
thus secured a devoted band of enthusiastic young men 
who delighted to enflame classical prejudices, not alone 
by their views, but by their clothes. Historical is the 
garb of Gautier, who led his cohort to the first per- 
formance in green trousers, a scarlet vest, black coat 
trimmed with velvet, and an overcoat of gray with green 
satin lining, the whole set off by long wavy curls. 
Among his fellows were Balzac the novelist, Delacroix 
the painter, Berlioz the composer, and many lesser 
champions of " liberty " in the liberal arts. The op- 
position was more numerous and hardly less intense. 
Unreasoning support was met with equally unreason- 
ing condemnation ; and from February 26 to June 5, 
1830, the battle raged nightly, till there was not a 
verse that had not at some time been applauded or 
hissed. The result, if not a victory for "Hernani," 
was a victory for all that it represented. The fetters 
of the unities, as Boileau understood them, were broken. 
No further organized effort was made to resist the 
retrograde evolution of the Bom antic drama to its 
collapse with Hugo's "Burgraves" in 1843. 

Metrically and stylistically " Hernani" was epoch- 

1 Histoire du romantisme. See also Paul Albert, Les Origines du 
romantisme, and Coppee, La Bataille d' Hernani. 



208 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

making. Hugo was far more radical here than in his 
odes, and he boasts justly of his services in restoring 
the mot propre, the concrete noun, to a place of honor. 
Now first, as he says, what Delille and his fellows would 
have called the " olfactories " became a nose, " the 
long golden fruit " a pear ; he " crushed the spirals of 
paraphrase," and " said to Vaugelas, You are only a 
jaw-bone," 1 Then, too, his prosody was here more 
free, — perhaps as a result of his study of Goethe's 
alexandrines in the second part of "Faust," which 
Hugo read at this time. But as a drama whether of 
plot or of character the play was fatally weak. Since 
Schiller's " Bobbers," all outlaws had been magnani- 
mous ; but Hernani had a pundonor that even Castil- 
ians found exaggerated. Hernani owes his life to 
Don Ruy Gomez, and has promised to hold it at his 
call. Both love Dona Sol, who, as a Romantic heroine, 
naturally prefers the bandit to the duke. But as Her- 
nani is about to enjoy the fruition of his love, his rival 
recalls his promise by a signal on the horn, and honor 
forces the bridegroom to take the poison that his 
bride generously shares. 

This close has much pathos, but it is rather elegiac 

1 J'ai dit a la narine: Et mais! tu n'est qu'un nez! 
J'ai dit au long fruit d'or: Mais tu n'est qu'une poire! 
J'ai dit a Vaugelas : Tu n'es qu'une machoire! . . . 
J'ai de la periphrase e"crase* les spirales. (Contemplations, I. vii.) 
An example of these " spirals " may not be without interest. Du 
Belloy, in his " Siege de Calais," which a contemporary critic calls 
" one of the two most lachrymose successes of the eighteenth cen- 
tury " (its date is 1765), wants to say that dog's meat was dear; he 
says it thus : — 

Le plus vil aliment, rebut de la misere, 

Mais aux derniers abois ressource terrible et chere, 

De la fidelite respectable soutien, 

Manque a Tor prodigue' du riche citoyen. 






THE YOUNG HUGO. 209 

than dramatic. Indeed, Hugo is never as successful in 
passages of love or humor as in rhetorical eloquence 
and in satire. So here the crown of the drama is the 
long monologue of Charles V. at the tomb of Charle- 
magne, and one of the most striking passages is the 
description of a series of portraits ; but neither mono- 
logue nor description advances the action, nor does the 
amorous dialogue of the closing scene, which owes its 
interest to the epic strife of implacable hatred and 
undying love. It is quite true that this strife is 
founded on a situation strained and dramatically un- 
real ; but the same stricture would apply to the whole 
Eomantic drama, not alone in France, but also in 
Germany. 

To the Naturalistic mind much of the sentiment of 
" Hernani " has become mawkish, and many of the 
tirades seem mere beating the air. The conventions 
of Italian opera may maintain the popularity of Verdi's 
" Ernani ; " but Hugo's play has ceased to attract the 
great public of the stage, and it met with but a cold 
reception at its recent revival. The theatrical public 
has not the same literary training as the reading pub- 
lic, and, in the nature of the case, it can neither dwell 
on what it enjoys, nor pass lightly over the foibles 
and weakness of Eomantic exaggeration. But if the 
cultured reader makes the Eomantic equation at the 
outset, and does not judge the work by strictly dra- 
matic standards, he will not fail to feel the charm of 
a generous warmth of emotion, a throbbing overflow- 
ing life that thrills through all, and he may summon in 
vain his memories of Corneille to find a scene where 
tragic admiration is so nobly roused as by the emperor 
in the cathedral vaults of Aix-la-Chapelle, as he stands 
by the tomb of the great Charlemagne. 

14 



210 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

It will be clear that " Hernani " lacks unity of action. 
Precisely the best scenes have no connection with the 
central situation. The whole fifth act might be spared. 1 
Now, the cause of this lack of unity in action is clear, 
and a recognition of it will help in judging Hugo's 
other dramas. Hugo has always a thesis at heart, a 
part of his own individuality to display ; and he cares 
more for this than for the development of character 
or dramatic action. Therefore he tends constantly to 
exchange the dramatic for the lyric or declamatory 
strain. Therefore, more and more with each succeed- 
ing drama, his characters become symbols, till at last 
in " Les Burgraves " they are proclaimed by the author 
himself to be such. Therefore, in every play situations 
are laboriously contrived, scenes and even acts are 
crudely inserted, that Hugo may declaim behind the 
mask of his hero. And it is noteworthy that it is just 
these, the most undramatic passages, that are best 
worth remembering. 

Since the virtues and vices of " Hernani " reappear 
in all the dramas of Hugo's first period, it is convenient 
to treat them together, that we may reserve for the 
close his lyrics in verse and in prose. He had said, in 
a preface to " Hernani," that this " was only the first 
stone of an edifice that existed complete in his mind." 
Only the whole would show the value and appropriate- 
ness of this drama, as of a Moorish porch to a Gothic 
cathedral. There is a certain truth in his antithesis. 

1 This was the main point of " N, I, Ni," one of the many parodies of 
the time. After the fourth act, at the first performance, the spectators, 
abetted no doubt by the claque, prepared to leave the house, when the 
manager appeared before the curtain and said : " Gentlemen, perhaps 
you thought the play over. Any one would have thought so ; but there 
is another act, for the second and true denouement." See Bire, op. 
cit. p. 502. 



THE YOUNG HUGO. 211 

" Hernani " is more distinctly Spanish in its uniform 
tone, less Gothic in its contrasts of fair and foul, tragic 
and comic, grotesque and sublime, than any of the 
plays that followed it; more even than the earlier 
" Marion de Lorme," to which the Eevolution of July 
now opened the theatre. 

Though one cannot, with Dumas, regard this play 
as Hugo's best, it is in many ways the most interesting 
of his dramas. The scene is the Paris of Louis XIII. 
and of Eichelieu; the subject, rehabilitation of the 
courtesan Marion by her true love for Didier, the 
rather dubious hero of the play, a sort of rechauffe of 
Eene, pessimistically sentimental and as absolutely 
foreign to the age of Louis XIII. as to ours. Didier 
has been involved in a duel, and is sentenced to execu- 
tion ; but Marion saves him, placating the judge by the 
sacrifice of her painfully regained virtue, preferring 
the life of her lover to his esteem. He, however, 
spurns her sacrifice, and will not be saved at such a 
price. So ended the " Marion de Lorme " of 1830. 
Later Merim^e persuaded Hugo to soften the conclu- 
sion by an exquisitely pathetic scene in which Marion 
and Didier take leave of each other forever. 

Such a drama can have little charm for English 
taste, and the beauties of the execution have never 
won it a wide circle of readers among us. In France, 
however, " Marion " became the mother of a numerous 
family of dramas and novels that dwelt with morbid 
delight on the possible reclamation to purity of mind 
and heart of fallen women by love. At first the 
emotional generosity of the Eomantic spirit caused 
the balance to incline toward a charity wider even 
than Hugo's ; but after a quarter of a century of 
ladies with and without camellias, a more sober mind 
returned with Augier's " Mariage d'Olympe." 



212 MODEKN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

It has been already said that the duel in " Marion " 
was taken from the experience of the struggling poet. 
Traces of his father's campaign in Vendue can be 
found in all his longer works for the next three years. 
During the rage of that civil strife a Eepublican sol- 
dier returning from service on the Ehine had been 
shot by an ambushed peasant, who, when he plundered 
the corpse of the murdered man, discovered his own 
son. Then the mother took her own life, and the 
father gave himself up to the Eepublicans with the 
certainty of a speedy execution. This idea, a beloved 
child unwittingly killed by a parent, forms the tragic 
conclusion of " Notre-Dame," and reappears in the 
dramas " Le Eoi s'amuse " and " Lucrece Borgia." 

" Le Eoi s'amuse " is a drama striking in itself and 
in the prominence that it gives to the Gothic inter- 
mingling of tragic and grotesque, as of the saints and 
imps on a cathedral tower. The plot of the play is 
familiar through Verdi's opera " Eigoletto ; " but though 
it appeared under the more liberal censorship of the 
Orleanists, it shared the fate of " Marion," being pro- 
hibited after a single performance by the King, who 
thought he discerned in it allusions to his father, 
Philippe Egalit<3, of Eevolutionary ill- fame, — allusions 
that were not flattering, as indeed how should they 
be ? But the royal decree revealed the poet in a 
new and very congenial capacity. In the legal pro- 
ceedings that ensued, he made an appeal for the 
liberty of the press that showed him without a living 
peer as an emotional orator. Whether "Le Eoi 
s'amuse" would have succeeded in 1832 we cannot 
know. On the modern stage it had the same respect- 
ful but lukewarm reception that fell to "Hernani/' 
and for the same reasons. 



THE YOUNG HUGO. ZL6 

But though its extravagance stands in the way of 
its present success, "Le Eoi s'amuse" is well worth 
careful reading ; for it is perhaps the most Hugoesque 
of all his dramas. The play suggests manifold points 
of comparison, and nearly as many of contrast, with 
Lessing's " Emilia Galotti." We are shown King 
Francis I., rich, careless, sparing neither the feelings 
nor the rights of any in his reckless hunt for pleasure, 
whose favorite jingling rhyme, 

Sou vent femnie varie, 
Bien fol qui s'y fie, 

is the apt expression of his easy virtue. He is not 
bad nor malicious, only thoughtless and libertine. 
In his wanton humor his eye falls on the fair 
daughter of his deformed dwarf, Triboulet, who 
combines with a museum of vices the one virtue of 
passionate love for his child, — a love that Hugo at- 
tributes to this toy and sport of royal favor precisely 
because no one would ever associate it with him. 
Triboulet discovers the king's fancy, and, frantic with 
paternal jealousy, determines to kill him. But his 
daughter immolates herself to save her royal lover. 
Triboulet's accomplices sew her body in a sack and 
cast her through a window. He stands below to 
gloat over his victim; but just as he prepares to 
throw the body into the river, he is startled by hear- 
ing the king himself pass by, humming his familiar air. 
And so the mimic world wags from utter frivolity and 
ferocity to extremest misery, as the awful truth dawns 
on the father; and the curtain falls on her unveiled 
corpse, and Triboulet lying in a swoon beside her. 

Here contrast is pushed to the uttermost ; the most 
generous and exalted sentiments are put in the mouth 
of Triboulet, just as they had been attributed the year 



214 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

before to his counterpart, Quasimodo, the hunchback 
of " Notre-Dame,," in a way that could not but make 
the judicious grieve, though before this tragedy of 
paternity both criticism and parody were silent. 

In the preface to " Cromwell " Hugo had pronounced 
verse the fit vehicle for dramatic expression. With 
"Lucrezia Borgia" 1 he turned in 1833 to prose; and 
into that more facile form he cast in the following 
years " Marie Tudor " and " Angelo." This concession 
to Naturalism was received with varied feelings by his 
fellow Eomanticists. 2 It is clear, however, that given 
the Eomantic drama as Hugo conceived it, with its 
exalted and sublimated passion, its exaggerated emo- 
tions and antitheses, and its fundamental distortion of 
nature, its best medium will be verse, because it, too, is 
artificial ; just as prose is the fit medium for the social 
comedy of our day. But though their form was an aes- 
thetic error, these prose dramas have intrinsic interest, 
and they served also as helpful precedents to writers 
who would have found the alexandrine a clog even with 
the new suppleness that Hugo had given to it. 

Into the plots of these plays we need not enter. 
"Lucrezia Borgia" broadens the charitable mantle of 
" Marion," to show how maternal love may redeem the 
deepest moral obliquity. Here also the parent is the 
unconscious cause of the child's death, and only its 
name connects the drama with history. One notes, 
however, with pain a concession to the melodrama, a 
sensational "supping full of horrors," to tickle the 
ears of the groundlings. The curtain fell amid popular 
applause on eight corpses ; but sager criticism saw from 

1 This play is the foundation of Donizetti's opera of like name. 

2 Gautier loyally averred that Hugo's prose was as good as his verse ; 
but only, he added, because it was his prose. 



THE YOUNG HUGO. 215 

the first that there was here a marked fall, both ethical 
and aesthetic, from the standard of " Marion " or even of 
"Hernani." And in the dramatic action, also, there 
was more wanton strength than supple deftness. 

" Marie Tudor " showed a further decline, for it was 
not even a good melodrama. Hugo says he wished to 
show a queen who should be " great in her royalty 
and true in her womanhood." But his Mary is a cari- 
cature, and not a dramatic one, and the spectator's 
suspense is of a kind that cannot be dignified with 
the name of tragic. The play lacks unity, and seldom 
deviates into scenes of interest. 1 "Angelo" is better 
constructed, but its scope is too all-embracing. This 
drama purports to have no less a mission than to 
present " universal femininity " in two types, " the 
woman in society and the woman out of society," and 
in two men, to show " all the relations that man can 
have with woman on the one hand, with society on 
the other." Such a programme might seem to make 
criticism superfluous ; and, indeed, the plot, melodra- 
matic a outrance, with its sleeping draughts and 
poisons, marks, like the caverns and secret doors of 
other plays, the author's lack of dramatic sense. It 
may be true that as sensational plays " Angelo " and 
"Lucrezia" are as good as "Hernani" and "Le Eoi 
s'amuse;" but that merit would give none of them 
more than a transient life. When the charm of form 
in poetic dialogue and declamation was taken away, 
what remained lost nearly all its purely literary value. 
Hugo had overestimated the place of the stage as a 
pulpit for ethical preaching, or at least he had over- 
estimated his power as a preacher. 

1 "V. Hugo raconte," iii. 183 sqq., contains a painfully fatuous ac- 
count of the reception of " Marie Tudor." 



216 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

Soon after Hugo had freed his bosom of this peril- 
ous stuff, there bloomed in his hand a little flower, 
a lyric drama, slight and frail, almost forgotten to-day, 
— his "Esmeralda," an exquisite libretto for an opera 
taken from his own " Notre-Dame." Perhaps this 
return to the metrical form, slight though it was, 
may have aided in persuading him that his dramatic 
aspirations required the aid of his poetic genius; for 
he returned to verse in "Ruy Bias," which, though far 
from faultless, ranks next to "Hernani" in popular 
esteem, and above it in the opinion of some critics. 
It certainly shows his dramatic theories in their ex- 
treme development. Nowhere are the contrasts be- 
tween grave and gay, tragic and grotesque, pushed to 
such violent and rapid alternation as here, both by 
precept in the preface and by practice in the play. 
In his own words : " The two opposite electricities of 
tragedy and comedy meet, and the spark that darts 
between them is ' Euy Bias/ " 

In his preface the author seeks, as usual, to explain 
the esoteric meaning of his piece ; but if he succeeds in 
making himself clear, it is only by making his play 
fundamentally ridiculous, however admirable its iso- 
lated parts may be. He wishes, he tells us, to show 
how society has changed in Spain since Hernani's day ; 
how beneath the nobility " a shadowy something stirs, 
great, sombre, unknown, — the people. The people, 
that possesses the future but not the present, orphaned, 
poor; intelligent, and strong; placed very low, aspiring 
very high ; with the mark of servitude on its back, and 
in its heart the premeditations of genius ; the people, 
valet of great lords, and in its abjection loving the sole 
image in this crumbling society that represents to it 
authority, charity, fruitf ulness," — of such a people his 
Ruy Bias is to be the type and symbol. 



THE YOUNG HUGO. 217 

This promises much ; but the briefest sketch of the 
story will show to every attentive reader 1 the most 
complete lack of intelligence, of truth and life. The 
plot is farcical, and the attempt to build a tragic action 
on it lacks common-senae. "The Greeks and Turks 
are nearer to us, both by their acts and sentiments, than 
the Spaniards or the French of Victor Hugo." And 
yet there is in " Buy Bias " a superb poetic evocation 
of a decaying monarchy, and the monologue of the 
lackey prime-minister on the glories of Charles V. is a 
piece of declamation worthy to rank with that of 
Charles himself at the tomb of Charlemagne. But 
these admirable passages would be as appropriate in 
" Les Chatiments " or " La L^gende des sifecles " as in this 
drama, and when we disengage the story itself from its 
poetic adornments, we find ourselves in a maze of pueril- 
ities which it is quite unnecessary to unravel here. 

The truly fantastic morality of a play where a lackey 
loves a queen and wins the pardon of his presumption 
by poisoning himself, will more than counterbalance in 
sober minds its superb eloquence. Yet it would be 
unjust to say with Vinet that " Euy Bias is a jest, a 
parody, with no idea, no inspiration, and no interest." 
On the contrary, in the first act there is more skill of 
dramatic structure than Hugo had ever shown, and the 
action is set in motion with remarkable celerity and 
deftness. The second act does indeed fail to fulfil this 
dramatic promise, but it gives us an exquisite idyl of 
passion roused in a neglected heart by the mystery of 
an unknown lover. In the third act the absurdity 
of the climax is redeemed by most eloquent declama- 
tion. The fourth act the critic may indeed feel con- 
strained to abandon as a dramaturgical error. Hugo 

1 Cp. Lanson, p. 959, who makes substantially the same statement. 



218 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

intends a farcical interlude, but his wit is too elephantine 
in its gambols. But in the fifth act one's impatience 
at the sentimentality of the lackey and the queen is 
mollified by lyric passages of great pathos and lines of 
true Corneillian force ; the outpourings of a genius that, 
whatever the form of its expression — song, drama, 
novel, or essay — was always lyric in its essence. Thus 
regarded, " Euy Bias " is the best of Hugo's dramas. 

It remains to speak of " Les Burgraves," which closes 
the brief course of the Eomantic theatre. Hugo may 
have grown weary, after " Buy Bias," of forcing his 
genius into this uncongenial channel; for five years 
separate these plays, during which he published a vol- 
ume of verse and an account of a journey to Germany 
in his peculiar lyric vein. This journey furnished the 
scene and in some measure the inspiration of "Les 
Burgraves." It does not add to the eagerness with 
which the reader essays this drama of four genera- 
tions to be told in an oracular preface that it is "a 
philosophic abstraction . . . the palpitating and com- 
plete symbol of expiation ; " nor is there much hope of 
dramatic unity in a work that is proclaimed to be 
" laughter and tears, good and evil, high and low, fa- 
tality, providence, genius, chance, society, the world, 
nature, life," above all which, the confident author con- 
tinues, " you feel that something grand is soaring." He 
proposes to give a complete picture of the German 
middle ages as his fancy conjures it before him. " His- 
tory, legend, tale, reality, nature, the family, love, 
naive manners, savage faces, princes, soldiers, adven- 
turers, kings, patriarchs as in the Bible, hunters of 
men as in Homer, Titans as in iEschylus, crowded all 
at once on the dazzled imagination of the author," who 
seems to seek to reconvey to the spectator his own 
mental confusion. 



THE YOUNG HUGO. 219 

To trace the chain of sensational effects by which 
this forlorn hope of the Eomantic drama sought to 
galvanize the interest of a weary public would be alike 
tedious and unprofitable. One is shown a stolen child, 
a son who just misses being a parricide, a girl in a trance 
as in " Angelo," coffins on the stage as in " Lucrezia ; " 
there is a cavern, too, and an imperial ghost to stay the 
murderous hand and unite the lovers. No wonder 
such a play achieved an utter fiasco. When characters 
announce to the audience " I am murder and vengeance," 
we have passed from the reform to the second child- 
hood of the drama. 

Hugo's epic conception was grandiose, but it was irre- 
concilable with the limitations of the dramatic genre. 
To these fundamental limitations Hugo refused to con- 
f orim He was no longer content to mingle the tragic and 
the comic ; he injected into the drama history, philoso- 
phy, the epic, and the lyric ; and to make his dramatic 
action carry such foreign elements, he was forced to 
stimulate it by sensational tricks in constantly increas- 
ing measure, until Pegasus sank under the burden and 
the dosing. But if the drama could not carry such 
burdens, he had no further use for it. He would not 
seek an audience that had abandoned him for the timid 
classical revival of Ponsard's School of G-ood Sense. 
Indeed, it was not in the drama alone that Eomanticism 
as a dogmatic theory of literature was bankrupt. As 
Nanteuil told Hugo, " There were no more young men," 
in 1843, such as had made the success of "Hernani" 
in 1830 ; and so the poet was led for a time from litera- 
ture to politics, from which ten years later he returned 
to letters, another and a far stronger man. But before 
we follow him there, somewhat must be said of his 
work in lyric poetry and prose fiction during this his 
essentially dramatic period. 



220 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

The year that followed " Hernani " was made illus- 
trious by " Notre-Dame " and by " Les Eeuilles d'au- 
tomne." The lyrics of the latter volume equalled any 
that Hugo had yet written, and were not soon sur- 
passed. " Notre-Dame " is an historical novel, less 
erudite perhaps than " Cinq-Mars," but more poet- 
ically vivid, having indeed a " Gothic intensity of 
pathos," though the reader will hardly find in it that 
" Grecian perfection of structure " which Swinburne 
admired. The student may pick many a flaw in his 
picture of Paris in the days of Louis XI., and still 
more in his description of mediaeval society; but he 
will not with all his documents, even if he be a 
Michelet, produce facts that will efface in our minds 
the outlines of Hugo's fancy, or make the Paris of 
1482 other to us than the Paris of Esmeralda. 

The plot is of the slightest. Esmeralda, the fair 
gypsy, is loved by a priest fiercely, by a soldier gayly, 
by a hunchback monster passionately, and is finally 
executed as a sorceress through the unwitting inter- 
vention of her own mother, — Hugo's favorite situation. 
But far more living than any of these people is the 
cathedral itself, ever present as a symbol of the society 
over which it broods. 1 Very vivid also are the pictur- 
esque crowds and the vagabond life of the Cour des 
Miracles, with its nimble cripples and clairvoyant blind, 
its polyglot language, strange customs, and weird super- 
stitions, that give us the illusion of Naturalism itself. 

While therefore as a novel "Notre-Dame" is of the 
slightest, it is a marvel of reproductive imagination. 
By far the best parts are those in which the author 
abandons wholly and frankly the thread of his narra- 

1 This symbolical use of inanimate objects is frequently employed 
with great effect by Zola and Ibsen, and latterly by Daudet. 



THE YOUNG HUGO. 221 

tive to tell of ancient Paris, of the cathedral, of the 
wily and perverse Louis XL, of the ancient law courts, 
or of the relations of mediaeval architecture to the 
invention of printing. 1 He declared that to inspire 
the people with a love of their national monuments 
was " one of the chief ends of his book and indeed 
of his life." And his wish was in so far fulfilled that 
a more intelligent care for historic buildings and mon- 
uments dates from the Eomantic movement; and to 
this nothing contributed more than " Notre-Dame," 
where the studies of an enthusiastic lover of the past 
were vivified by a style that if it had been learned 
from Chateaubriand was none the less Hugo's pe- 
culiar possession. This was the only important 
prose work of the early period, however ; for " Claude 
Gueux," which followed in 1835, was but an eddy 
in his literary productivity. It repeated the Quixotic 
protest against capital punishment begun by the " Der- 
nier jour d'un condanm£" (1828), a bit of intense im- 
agination much praised in its day, and repeated at 
intervals in and out of season through his whole life. 

The " Feuilles d'automne," as is natural in a devel- 
oping poetic genius, showed more care to avoid the 
faults and excesses of earlier work than to strike out 
into untried paths. But the public had advanced 
toward his aesthetic position ; and so the new volume 
found a wider and readier acceptance than any that 
had gone before, though, when it is regarded from the 
summit of his poetic achievement, it seems to mark 
progress only in a fuller mastery of metre. Neither 
the lights nor the shadows are as strong here as 
formerly ; and it is precisely in this chiaroscuro that 
Hugo excels, as he showed in the " Orientales." The 

1 Books iii. 1, 2 ; v. 2 ; vi. 1 ; x. 5. 



222 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

more domestic subjects of the " Autumn Leaves," the 
sentiments and aspirations of the fireside, are much less 
favorable to his genius. But if the collection is dis- 
appointing in itself, it bears several marks of promise 
in the broadening of the poet's mind. Here, first, in 
"Dedain" he adds to his lyre "the brazen cord" that 
was to ring so nobly in the poetry of his exile. Here, 
too, can be traced, in " La Prifere pour tous," the instinct 
of universal sympathy that circles the miseries of the 
world, foreshadowing " Les Mis^rables " and the later 
romances. This sympathy seems sometimes to extend 
beyond mankind into a pantheistic aspiration to " min- 
gle his whole soul with creation," as though the poet 
would make his inner world of throbbing images and 
feelings fruitful by contact with all external nature. 

Four years occupied with dramatic and critical work 
separate the "Autumn Leaves" from the "Twilight 
Songs," the most varied of all Hugo's lyric volumes. 
Here light, social, occasional pieces obscure poems of 
the highest order on which the reader comes quite 
unawares and unprepared, so that repeated reading and 
close observation alone will prevent some grain escap- 
ing with the chaff. Many of these verses are surely 
anterior to the " Orientales," and some seem to belong 
to his " follies before he was born." Several bear an 
elegiac imprint, and show a tendency to mystic adora- 
tion that he certainly did not feel in 1835, for at no 
time before his exile had he been so aggressively bitter 
and morosely pessimistic as then, 1 and bitterness and 
pessimism are the dominant notes of what is new in 
the "Chants du crdpuscule." They are the source 
of those regrets of vanished youth, of the time when 
his "thoughts, like a swarm of bees, flew upward 
1 Cp. Dupuy : V. Hugo, p. 87 (Classiques populaires). 



THE YOUNG HUGO. 223 

toward the sun . . . when pride, joy, ecstasy, like pure 
wine from a rich vase, overflowed from my seventeen 
years." Then his mind was free, he says ; but now he 
is " torn with rage " at critics who " outrage him in 
all his work," and at the censorship, " that bitch with 
low forehead that skulks behind all power, vile, crunch- 
ing ever in her filthy jaws some fragment of thy 
starry robe, Muse ! " 1 Already the follies of the 
Orleanists are beginning to rouse in him the revolu- 
tionary liberal, with enough of the poet mingled with 
the democrat to make him prefer to the piping peace 
of Louis Philippe the glorious labors of Napoleon, 
whom distance is already beginning to crown with a 
luminous halo of legend. This mental state explains 
why Hugo's satire has now become more frequent and 
threatening ; and the conviction that the civilization 
of the small minority is bought with the suffering of 
the mass of mankind has given to his universal sym- 
pathy a socialistic coloring. 

Yet for several years these germs remained quies- 
cent. The " Inner Voices," his next volume of verse, 
has little that is satiric, socialistic, or political. It 
marks rather a deepening of that communion with 

1 Et comme un vif essaim d'abeilles, 
Mes pensees volaient au soleil . . . 
Ou Torgeuil, la joie et l'extase, 
Comme un vin pur, d'un riche vase, 
Debordaient de mes dix-sept ans . . . 
Moi qui dechire tant de rage . . . 
Quelque bouche fletrie 
Dans tous mes ouvrages m'outragea. 

(A Mile J., lines 41-42, 17-19, 7, 109-11.) 
Cette chienne au front bas qui suit tous les pouvoirs, 
Vile, et machant toujours dans sa gueule souillee, 
O muse ! quelque pan de ta robe etoilee. 

(A Alphonse Kabbe, at the close.) 



224 MODEKN FKENCH LTTERATUKE. 

Nature that could be traced in the " Autumn Leaves." 
Here is his first song of the sea, which no French poet 
has loved and rendered as he has done. Here, too, is 
that striking picture of Nature as a nursing mother, 
symbolized in "La Vache." Even where we might 
listen for the " brazen cord," as in " Sunt Lachrymse 
Eerum " or " Al'Arc de Triomphe" we catch rather an 
elegiac than a Pindaric strain. And yet one must go 
back to the " Orientales " to find such vigor and grace 
of language, such pregnant and picturesque lines as 
are set like jewels in some of these descriptive lyrics. 

One more volume, " Sunbeams and Shadows," com- 
pletes the poetic output of the first period. Though 
published after the German journey, it bears little 
trace of a changed temper or broadened mind. Here, 
even more than in the " Inner Voices," one finds self- 
restraint, delicacy of touch, less of the thunder, more 
of the murmuring brook and whispering breeze. 1 The 
satire, too, is dominated by the generous warmth of 
universal sympathy, a little shallow in its breadth, 
that was to give the key-note to his political activity 
in the next decade. It was by this that his genius 
was diverted from the stage and the lyre to the 
tribune and to political agitation. The ten years from 
1843 to 1853 are marked by no literary work of im- 
port. But when destiny, kind in its apparent harsh- 
ness, sent Hugo into exile and so gave him back to 
literature, it was seen how essentially this experience 
had enriched and deepened his nature. Indeed, when 
he turned to politics, the best that was in him to give 
was not only ungiven but unsuspected and unrealized. 

1 The most striking pieces of this type are " Tristesse d'Olympio," 
" La Statue," the verses on Palestrina, and the account of his boyhood 
at the Feuillantines (Les Rayons et les ombres, nos. 34, 36, 35, 19). 



HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TRIUMPH. 225 



CHAPTEE VII. 

HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TRIUMPH. 

The decade that separates " Les Burgraves " from " Les 
Chatiments " marks a vital change in the mind of 
Victor Hugo and in the character of his work. Even 
the most superficial examination of the kind and 
amount of his production makes this obvious. In the 
first fifty years of his life drama takes the first place, 
there is more poetry than fiction, and nearly a quarter 
of the whole bulk is made up of miscellaneous travels, 
memoirs, and essays. In the second period fiction 
advances to the first place ; poetry is immediately be- 
hind, and is closely followed by political satires and 
pamphlets, which are hardly literature in the highest 
sense, though they often contain pages of the greatest 
eloquence. Essays and the drama count but one 
volume each. The lyric was now recognized as the 
best field for the display of his powers, and even in 
the prose fiction it takes a much larger place than in 
" Notre-Dame " or " Bug-Jargal." 1 

In all departments the work of the second period 
shows a new strength and earnestness. The causes 
of this added depth and force are to be sought in his 

1 The " edition definitive," from which all citations are here made, 
counts seventy volumes, including the autobiographical "V. Hugo 
racoiite." Of these twenty-six are prior, thirty-four posterior, to 1852. 
Poetry counts, respectively, six and fourteen volumes ; fiction, five and 
fifteen ; drama, nine and one ; political prose, two and ten ; miscella- 
neous prose, four and four. 

15 



226 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

domestic and political experiences. The death of his 
daughter Ldopoldine, drowned with her young husband 
at Villequier in 1843, was the first great sorrow of his 
life, and left an impression as enduring and as fruit- 
ful as the loss of Hallam on Tennyson. It was per- 
haps to escape from these sorrowful meditations that 
he sought distraction in the struggles of the political 
arena, to which his untrained but generous mind was 
attracted by the socialism of Proudhon and Fourier, 
who had roused in the substratum of French thought 
a vague but intense enthusiasm that was presently to 
find expression in the Eevolution of 1848. From 1835 
one can trace an increasing democratic tendency in 
Hugo's writing. His interest in politics grows yearly 
more active ; and when he is received into the Academy 
in 1841, his inaugural address is political rather than 
literary. That Louis Philippe made him a peer in 
1845 did not change his sympathies, and the Eevolu- 
tionists promptly elected him a member of their Con- 
stituent Assembly in 1848. 

One cannot view Hugo's career as a practical politi- 
cian with much satisfaction, though the Eevolution 
was not so fatal to him as to Lamartine. At first, 
power or the presage of danger that lay in the incon- 
gruous composition of the Assembly itself caused in 
him a conservative reaction. He favored Louis Napo- 
leon, and opposed all the economic schemes of the radi- 
cals, though he refused to sanction political prosecutions 
and pleaded eloquently for the abolition of the death 
penalty. Yet in the next year the caressing flattery 
of Girardin dexterously converted him into a radical 
orator and journalist, most vehement to adore what 
he had burned and burn what he had adored. But 
his bitter and eloquent attacks on Napoleon and Mon- 



HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TKIUMPH. 227 

talembert could be tellingly answered by quotations 
from his own speeches ; and this made him distrusted 
by his new allies, while he seemed grieved at their 
suspicion, and quite unconscious of the deviousness of 
his course. 1 

Thus the coup d'etat of 1851 was a moral good 
fortune for Hugo. It saved him from himself, and 
made of one who seemed a political turn-coat and vis- 
ionary a martyr and a hero whose voice penetrated 
from his island exile into every corner of France. His 
" Histoire d'un crime " is an eloquent account of those 
stirring days, but it shows how his efforts to organize 
resistance to the usurped authority of the false Bona- 
parte were distrusted by his fellow Eepublicans. He 
fled to Brussels, whence the Belgian government soon 
invited him to move to the more hospitable protection 
of England. He took up his residence as near France 
as possible, in the Channel Islands, — first in Jersey, 
then, at the suggestion of the English government, in 
Guernsey, till the collapse of the Second Empire at 
Sedan brought him back to his country to share the 
darkest days of the young Kepublic's " Terrible Year." 
He had consistently scorned every offer of amnesty 
from the successful adventurer whose perjury he had 
branded, and he remained to the last true to the ring- 
ing words of his early exile : " Though but one remain 
unreconciled, that one shall be I." 2 

These years of exile steeled his mind to greater 
hardness. The temper of his arms was first revealed 
by the presence of a powerful and despised enemy. 
His patriotism found new fire in his country's shame. 
Already in 1852 he had given a foretaste of his mor- 

1 See Bire, V. Hugo apres 1830, ii. 116-204. 

2 Et s'il n'en reste qu'un, je serai celui-la. (Les Chatiments, p. 349.) 



228 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

dant wrath both in justifying a joint appeal to insur- 
rection that had been issued by the radical leaders, 
and in the pamphlet " Napoldon le petit/' whose scur- 
rilousness is excused both by its vigor and its subject. 
But these paled before " Les Chatinients," in which the 
lyric unites with the satiric to produce a classic that 
will long survive the Empire that evoked it. 

This book, like "Napoleon le petit," enjoyed the 
advertisement of police prohibition during the whole 
imperial period, and no doubt contributed materially 
to nurse the spirit that brought the Second Empire 
to the disaster that justified the poet's severity. But 
exile gave him calmer hours also, and to these we owe 
the " Contemplations," a collection of lyrics similar to 
"Les Eayons et les ombres," but closing in a nobler 
strain ; while a little later, in 1857, Hugo is able to 
show, in his first " Legend of the Centuries," the high- 
water mark of his achievement in the lyrical epic. 
Then, in 1862, the long-expected romance " Les Misd- 
rables " justified the intent expectation of ten nations, — 
for nine translations appeared on the same day as the 
original, an event unparalleled till then in the annals 
of fiction. This interest was judiciously whetted in 
1863 by the una vowed autobiography, and in 1864 he 
essayed once more what he called literary criticism in 
" William Shakespeare," an introduction to a translation 
of the English poet, and, as was to be anticipated, much 
more visionary and oracular than logical or precise. 

Then follows the Indian summer of Hugo's muse, 
his " Chansons des rues et des bois," to be succeeded 
by another social and pseudo-philosophic novel, "The 
Toilers of the Sea." He was now so unquestionably 
the foremost of French writers that the Empire could 
not well get along without him, and visitors to the 



HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TRIUMPH. 229 

Paris Exposition of 1867 found the Guide to that 
pageant provided with a preface by the distinguished 
exile. So these last years of banishment were less a 
grief than a balm to his amour propre. His steadfast 
attitude won sympathy for his literary work. The 
success of "Hernani" on its revival in 1867 w^as cer- 
tainly beyond its dramatic desert, and that of " Lucre- 
zia Borgia " in 1870 is unquestionably to be attributed 
to personal esteem, for only a year before the same 
public had received with unwonted coldness his fan- 
tastic novel, " L'Homme qui rit." 

As the Empire tottered to its fall, Hugo's interest in 
politics became more absorbing. His two sons joined 
with his son-in-law Vacquerie and the since notorious 
Eochefort to publish " Le Kappel," a radical journal. 
To this the exile frequently contributed, and so pre- 
pared for himself an enthusiastic reception in Paris 
whenever the inevitable revolution should invite his 
return. But 1870 revealed once more and almost 
immediately the hopelessly unpractical nature of his 
political ideas, by his appeal to the triumphant Germans 
to desert the men who had led them to victory, found 
a republic, and ally themselves to the French, whom 
they had always distrusted and now despised. Nor was 
Hugo satisfied with this sky-rocket. In February, 
1871, the electors of Paris had chosen him by a great 
majority to be their delegate to the National Assembly ; 
but here the violence of his speeches against the inevit- 
able peace roused that body to such a pitch of impa- 
tience that in March he shook its dust from his feet. 

A tew days later he lost a son and brought the 
body to Paris, just as the Commune was achieving its 
first success. He remained here long enough to pro- 
test against the destruction of the Vendome Column, 



230 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

to which it will be remembered he had dedicated two 
odes. Then he made his way a second time to Brussels, 
and was a second time invited by the government to 
leave it, barely escaping the violence of a Belgian mob 
for his defiance of international law. He went to 
Luxemburg, and later to Paris, where he failed signally 
in the elections of 1872, perhaps because his experience 
of the Communists had made him more conservative, 
perhaps because their experience of him had made the 
electors of Paris more cautious. 

But if he might not be the chosen tribune, he was 
already the poet-laureate of the Third Bepublic. A 
hundred thousand copies of " Les Chatiments " were sold 
within a year, it was publicly read in the theatres, and 
several of his plays, notably " Euy Bias," were revived 
with much success. In his new capacity he now put 
forth " L'Annde terrible," a national and patriotic 
volume that made a French critic exclaim with just 
pride that Germany had no such poet to sing her 
victory as France to glorify even her disaster. He 
followed this with a romance of the first Eevolution, 
" Quatre-vingt-treize," which, like " Les Mis^rables," 
appeared simultaneously in ten languages, though it 
did not gain the success of that work. But this was 
due more to the evolution of public taste than to any 
falling off in the powers of the author, who now turned 
to collecting his political memoirs and to a persistent 
campaign of letters and addresses that eventually 
secured his election to the Senate, though only by a 
narrow majority and on a second ballot. In this 
capacity the old man of seventy-four distinguished 
himself by zealously advocating a scheme for general 
amnesty, then so impracticable that it secured but six 
votes. But in 1877 he was able to do his country a 



HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TKIUMPH. 231 

real service by holding up before the conspirators of 
the Sixteenth of May his "History of a Crime" by 
which France had been betrayed in 1851. 

Meantime the second, though inferior, part of the 
" Legend of the Centuries " showed him still the great- 
est poet of France, and in " L'Art d'etre grandpfere " he 
touched the chords of domestic pathos almost as art- 
lessly as in the " Contemplations." But not content 
with these multiplied titles to literary renown nor 
heeding the warning of the years, he published a series 
of so-called " Philosophic Poems," 2 followed these with 
the two volumes of " Les Quatre vents de l'esprit " and 
" Torquemada," while he left unpublished other dramas 
and poems that have sufficed to fill several volumes. 

He died in 1885, in the season of roses, as he had 
foretold. 2 His great age, reaching out into a new gen- 
eration from an epoch that had passed away, could not 
but impress the popular imagination, the more as his 
talent, his presence, and his personal physique had in 
them something of the monumental and grandiose, so 
that his death stirred a wave of popular sympathy such 
as perhaps has been the lot of no writer since literature 
began. His body was exposed in state beneath the Arc 
de Triomphe. Thronging thousands gathered around 
it, and made his funeral a pageant that royalty might 
envy and could not parallel. The Pantheon, that 
French temple of fame, was abandoned by the patron 
saint of Paris to make room for its popular hero. 3 

1 Le Pape, La Pitie supreme, Les Religions et la religion, L'Ane 
(1878-1880). 

2 L'Annee terrible, Janvier, i. 

3 Hugo died without the sacraments of the church. The clergy 
therefore protested against his burial in the vaults of a consecrated 
building, and, when the protest was unheeded, abandoned it, not for 
the first time, to secular uses. 



232 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

This chronological review of Hugo's work may serve 
as an introduction to a study of it in its categories, 
from which alone one can estimate the poet's place or 
the nature and limitations of his genius. Here we 
may dismiss immediately the political speeches and 
pamphlets, for all their eloquence and bitterness is 
distilled and refined in the wormwood of " Les Chati- 
ments ; " nor need allusion be made to memoirs and 
letters, for these belong rather to biography than to 
literature. Fiction and poetry remain. By his novels 
Hugo is best, and often solely, known among us ; these, 
then, may introduce us to the works that make him 
one of the greatest lyric poets of the world. 

The generation that separated " Les Mis^rables " 
from " Notre-Dame " had, as we have seen, radically 
changed Hugo's sociology and politics. So while " Notre- 
Dame " was above all an evocation of the past, " Les 
Misdrables " reveals the author with his eyes on the 
present and his heart in the future. " So long," he says 
in his preface, " as there shall exist through the fault 
of our laws and customs a social condemnation that 
creates artificial hells in the midst of our civilization 
and complicates a divine destiny by human fatalism; 
so long as the three problems of the century — the degra- 
dation of man by the proletariat, the fall of woman by 
hunger, the arrested development of the child by igno- 
rance — are not solved ; so long as social asphyxia is pos- 
sible in any place, — in other words and from a wider 
point of view, so long as there shall be on earth igno- 
rance and misery, books like this cannot be useless." 

It may be doubted, however, whether Hugo has 
made an important contribution to the banishment of 
ignorance and misery from the world by this series 
of scenes loosely strung together by their connection 



HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TRIUMPH. 233 

with the convict, manufacturer, and philanthropist, 
Jean Valjean, and relieved, like " Notre-Dame," by 
digressions and lay-sermons that hamper the narrative 
but best reward the reader. Into the details of this 
narrative it is unnecessary to our purpose to enter. 
The strength of the work lies not in its romantic nor 
in its psychological interest, though there is power 
and truth in his analysis of the veil of ostracism that 
separates the convict from his fellows and almost 
forces him to crime ; and individual scenes, such as 
Valjean's escape from Thernardier, the defence of the 
barricade, and the flight through the sewers, are exe- 
cuted with great vigor, while parts of the description 
of the battle of Waterloo reveal the poetic imagination 
of Hugo in all its glory. 

The ten volumes of this vast romance lack continuity 
and proportion. If the work is regarded as a whole, 
Flaubert may be right in denying it either truth or 
grandeur ; and in parts the style is, as he says, " inten- 
tionally incorrect and vulgar." As in the dramas, the 
contrasts are sharp in subject, scene, and style,, and the 
story is but a thread on which Hugo strings his many- 
colored beads. Antiquarian lore, political reminis- 
cences, social vaticinations, realistic "slumming," with 
dialectic studies that show much curious observation, 
interrupt the narrative, which is itself half philosophic 
and half idyllic. The whole is a chaos of glowing 
eloquence, deep emotion, weary stretches of common- 
place, and a few treacherous quicksands of bathos that 
reveal a cyclopean lack of humor. He takes for his 
philosophic background voluntary expiation and re- 
pentance that produce a moral regeneration by the 
revelation of a higher life. Such a background ad- 
mirably sets off humanitarian pleas, and democratic if 



234 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

not socialistic sentiments ; for it is sentiment rather 
than reason with Hugo that makes the poor and op- 
pressed seem right, and the dominant and rich wrong. 
This emotional tone unites with directly autobio- 
graphical portions and a subjective style to give the 
whole a lyric character. The psychology is not based 
on observation, nor correlated with the actual condi- 
tions of life. Valjean is a Utopian who shows neither 
wisdom nor prudence. We feel that his visionary 
magnanimity would be neither natural nor profitable 
in life, and it threatens to be wearisome even in ro- 
mance. But the minor characters show still more 
of that inevitable tendency of subjective fiction to 
the symbol and the type that we have noted already 
in Hugo's earlier drama and fiction. Enjolras poses 
persistently as the apostle and martyr of uncom- 
promising democracy, Javert is at once more and less 
than human in his reverence for constituted author- 
ity, and the grisette Pantine is declared to be the 
symbol of joy and modesty, "innocence floating on 
error," and " still preserving the shade that separates 
Psyche from Venus." Marius is Hugo's youthful self, 
a type of young energy nursing democratic aspirations 
on imperial memories. But all of these together have 
not the life of the charming little gamin Gavroche, the 
classical study of the Paris street-boy ; for into this 
character Hugo put his poet's heart, and the touch of 
sympathy that makes the world kin. This and the 
epic descriptions familiar to every lover of French lit- 
erature will carry " Les Mis^rables" through many 
generations of readers and revolutions of popular taste, 
although even in the year of its appearance Hugo's 
novel was of a type of fiction already discredited. 
Here, as throughout his second period, he barred the 






HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TKIUMPH. 235 

current of a literary evolution that he did not avert or 
deflect. 1 

The epic and lyric elements in Hugo's fiction are 
even more strongly marked in " The Toilers of the Sea," 
inspired by the poet's life at Guernsey and his intimate 
daily contact with " the men who go down to the sea 
in ships and know the mystery of the great waters." 
An oracular preface tells us that Keligion, Society, and 
Nature are the three struggles of mankind and also 
its three needs. " A triple necessity weighs on us, 
of dogmas, laws, and things." Former romances had 
dealt with the first and second ; this should show 
how the fatality of things " is mingled with the su- 
preme fatality, the human heart." But these high- 
sounding phrases must not be taken too literally; 
for indeed the cause of all the tragic catastrophe is 
the heroine's lack of common honesty and the hero's 
lack of common-sense. Gilliat's emotions are as deep 
as the ocean. Deruchette is as treacherous and co- 
quettish as the sea. But, once more, what we enjoy 
is not the psychology of character nor the story, but 
the long description of the perilous and solitary quest 
of Gilliat on the Douvres, where throughout prose 
has suffered a sea-change, and throbs and thrills with 
the far-resounding waves. Yet, as a whole, " The Toil- 
ers of the Sea " is inferior both in power and in inter- 
est to " Les Mis^rables " and to " Notre-Dame." The 
imagination may be more grandiose, but the subject is 
more petty. Hugo needs either a wider canvas or an 
historical perspective. The latter he provided for his 
next novel, " L'Homme qui rit ; " but he saw fit, with 
strange perversity, to import into the English court of 
Elizabeth the extravagances of " Han d'lslande," and 
1 The metaphor is Brunetiere's. 



236 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

even the unparalleled efforts of his publishers could 
not avert its rejection by a public now in the full- 
blooded confidence of the Naturalistic spring. 

The busy times of republican reconstruction were 
hardly passed, however, before Hugo, piqued by this 
check, returned to historical fiction. Taught by ex- 
perience or guided by instinct, he now chose the period 
suited of all others to his genius and environment, 
and gave to the world in "Ninety-three" one of the 
most remarkable historical evocations of French litera- 
ture. The time is the crucial year of the First Ee- 
public; the scene, the civil war in Vendde, to which 
Hugo was attracted both by his nature and nurture, 
for his parents united the blood of the contending 
factions. In this novel one notes indeed the growing 
mannerisms of old age, with the unevenness of style 
and looseness of construction common to all of Hugo's 
novels, but one finds also more intensity of action, 
more real palpitating life, and a truer tragic catas- 
trophe than in any of his earlier romances. The Ven- 
d^an hero Lantenac is not too heroic for a Breton 
noble, nor is his nephew G-auvin too sentimental for 
a Eepublican of the " Feast of Pikes." The unique 
epoch justified and demanded a more than human 
heroism and magnanimity. In Cimourdain, to be 
sure, one recognizes with no special pleasure the 
Javert of " Les Mis^rables," the uncompromising pur- 
suer of an ideal, — in this case the incarnate Eepublic, 
— who, like his prototype, ends his life by suicide, 
as if to teach that a life of law without sentiment 
seems to the Eomantic mind impossible and self- 
destructive. 

But, as before, in "Ninety-three," what leaves the 
freshest impress on the mind are the minor characters 



HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TRIUMPH. 237 

and incidents, — the peasant woman with her three 
children that run like a golden thread through these 
scenes of fire and blood; the delightful old trooper, 
Eadoub ; pictures of political Paris suggesting the 
magic-lantern slides of Carlyle. The weird procession 
of the guillotine, the cannon aboard ship broken loose 
and spreading terror and destruction, the sieges of 
Dol and of La Torgue, take here the place of the 
fight with the devil-fish in the "Toilers," and of 
Waterloo and the Barricade in " Les Miserables ; " 
and the climax, in spite of some rather rank flowers 
of rhetoric, is unusually effective and affecting. In- 
deed, " Ninety-three " is Hugo's best novel, though its 
place in literature is less unique and probably lower 
than that of " Notre-Dame " or of the redemption of 
Jean Valjean. 

But it is time to leave these lower walks and ascend 
to the heights of Hugo's genius. For in his poetry this 
second period is much more than a convenient divi- 
sion; it marks a distinctly new manner. Eomantic 
it is still, but now rather in the nobler form of an 
idealist's protest against the cloud of skepticism in 
the mind and weariness in the will that characterized 
the Second Empire. So a Les Chatiments" of 1853 are 
as different from "Les Eayons et les ombres" of 1840 
as tempered steel is from polished iron. His politi- 
cal experience, followed by the enforced calm and the 
bitter indignation of exile, gave his verses from this 
time an intensity of conviction that seems sometimes 
to echo the earnestness of a Hebrew prophet. While 
Gautier sought excuse and forgetfulness in his doc- 
trine of art for art, and taught that impersonality 
was essential to the highest reaches of poetry, these 
" Scourgings," throbbing and aglow with passion, anger, 



238 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

hatred, but burning too with a lofty and trustful 
patriotism, raised the protest of their ringing halt to 
the surrender of the noblest prerogative of literature. 
But it was only in exile that such lyrics were possi- 
ble, only in exile that French thought was free. " Les 
Chatiments," printed in Belgium and smuggled across 
the frontier in countless incorrect and garbled editions, 
concealed sometimes, it is said, in plaster casts of 
the emperor they scourged, aroused a fearful joy in 
countless readers. But among the poets of France 
the currents of development, though divergent, were 
away from Hugo. Here, too, he barred but did not 
deflect the course of lyric evolution. 

Nearly all the satires of " Les Chatiments " were 
written between December, 1851, and the end of the 
next year ; a few are anterior to that date, a very few 
are a little later. Evidently he "sang because he 
must;" his wrath was absolutely sincere. And yet 
critics have not failed to observe that he had rather 
less reason than others had to feel it. He had con- 
tributed as much as any man save Beranger to the re- 
vival of the Napoleonic legend ; and when De Vigny 
and Lamartine had tried to stem the tide whose 
consequences they foresaw, his second ode to the 
Vendome Column had sought to cover them with 
contempt. He had actually printed a special cheap 
and popular edition of his Bonapartist odes, in which 
he talks about regilding the altar of Napoleon's mem- 
ory, by whose death France is left a widow. Nor had 
he been wholly unwilling to co-operate with Louis 
himseff, until he found Louis unwilling to co-operate 
with him by rewarding his efforts with a cabinet posi- 
tion. 1 But Hugo had a happy faculty of forgetting 

i Cp. Bire, op. cit. ii. 192. 



HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TRIUMPH. 239 

his inconsistencies ; and whatever part disappointed 
ambition may have had in his change of political 
position, he was unflinching in his new convictions, 
and so sincere in his belief in himself that he hardly 
realized that he was exposing his own conduct to in- 
vidious criticism by his reckless denunciation of the 
supporters of the Empire. 

One other small reserve must be made before we 
can frankly praise " Les Ch&timents." In his violent 
emotion Hugo sometimes falls into strange errors of 
taste, and mistakes incoherent excitement for eloquent 
emphasis. Then, too, the uninformed reader will sus- 
pect what the well-informed reader knows, that his 
denunciation is sometimes unjust or merely vitupera- 
tive; and this, even more than exaggeration, is fatal 
to satiric effect. Several pieces and many lines of 
this sort mar Hugo's " Scourgings," x the more because 
of their general high range of excellence ; for, as 
Swinburne has said, 2 these ninety-eight poems between 
the prologue " Nox " and the epilogue " Lux " roll and 
break and lighten and thunder like the waves of a 
visible sea, and execute their chorus of rising and 
descending harmonies with almost as much depth, 
variety, and musical force, with as much power, life, 
and passionate unity, as the breakers on the shores 
where they were written. 

1 See, for instance "Un Autre "(p. 169), where Hugo calls the 
talented journalist Veuillot " a hypocritic Zo'ilus " whose mother was 
a Javotte and whose father was the devil. He even has the astonish- 
ingly bad taste to mock him for the poverty of his student years. It 
is natural to compare these verses, as Brunetiere has done (Poesic 
lyrique, ii. 81), with Voltaire's on Freron in "Le Pauvre diable " 
and " La Capitolade." On the causes and justice of Hugo's wrath, 
see Bire, especially op. cit. ii. 192, and "V. Hugo apres 1852," pp. 
42-55. 

2 Op. cit., p. 56, 



240 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

The clauses of the proclamation in which Napoleon 
announced the success of his coup d'etat furnish the 
external division of the satires; and the pieces are 
ordered with great skill, so that they will bear con- 
nected reading without monotony. The most pathetic 
and elegiac poems alternate with the noblest verses 
that wrath could inspire. What can be more touching 
than the grandmother's lament over the body of the 
little child killed by the volleys of that fatal Fourth 
of December (p. 81)? What more exquisite than the 
simple story of the exile and death of Pauline Eoland 
(p. 27), or the songs of the banished and of those they 
left behind them (pp. 64, 209) ? What more beautiful 
than the calm repose of his "Dawn" at Jersey (p. 175), 
or what more strong in its epic simplicity than the 
opening lines of " Expiation " (p. 223), surely the 
finest piece in this rich treasury, with its terrible pic- 
ture of the retreat from Moscow, through which runs 
like a shiver the refrain : " It snowed, It snowed " ? 
What more intense than the lines on Waterloo that 
follow, and what more galling than their bitter con- 
clusion that the only adequate expiation for Napo- 
leon I. is the contemplation of Napoleon III. ? What 
more stinging verses were ever penned than that other 
contrast between the great and the little Napoleon 
(p. 311), where each strophe hisses with added con- 
tempt its refrain " Petit, Petit " ? What more grew- 
some than the picture of the half -buried victims of the 
street-massacre (p. 37), or than his call to the people 
to rise, like Lazarus from his tomb (p. 77) ; or, finally, 
what more noble than his appeal to God to strengthen 
his hand for vengeance (p. 101), and to the oppressed 
to be moderate in their destined triumph : " Let Cain 
pass by, he belongs to God " (pp. 151, 156) ? How 



HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TRIUMPH. 241 

stirring is his patriotic appeal to the flags of the first 
Empire ! What calm consolation, what confidence in 
the ineffable love of the all-upholding arms, breathes 
in " Stella " (p. 283) ! And, finally, where in Hugo, or 
in all French verse, shall we find such a rush and 
sweep of contemptuous scorn as in " La Eeculade " 
(p. 295) ? 

These lyrics have frequently an epic element, and in 
a few pieces the satire takes a dramatic form. 1 Here, 
with the bold personification of a mediaeval miracle- 
play, the Cellars of Lille, the Garrets of Eouen, the 
Prison Ships, a Tomb, Justice, Eeason, Honor, and the 
Marseillaise stamp in laconic epigrams their condem- 
nation of Napoleon, and Conscience teaches Harmodius 
that " he may kill that man with tranquillity." Note- 
worthy, too, is the consolation that the exile sought 
and found in increasing measure in nature and in the 
sea, whose mysterious fascination grew on him from 
the drowning of his daughter, in 1843, till it reached 
its climatic expression in "The Toilers of the Sea." 
Especially does one note this temper in the closing 
section of " Les Chatiments ; " for in " Lux " all vitu- 
peration, denunciation, and bitterness are laid aside in 
a grand vision of peace on earth and good-will, where 
God shall take the rope of the alarm bell and bind 
with it the thoughts of men in an eternal sheaf, where 
each shall labor for all, and all rejoice in the work of 
each. Eternal hope conquers all doubt with its cer- 
tainty and all vengeance in its magnanimity. 

This serener temper inspires also " Les Contempla- 
tions " with a peculiar charm that makes this collec- 
tion, or at least its latter division, the noblest purely 
lyric poetry in French. The earlier part contains 

1 Pages 69, 73, 147, 195 of the 16mo edition. 
16 



242 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

only verses written prior to 1843, which might have 
been mentioned in connection with " Les Eayons et 
les ombres " had there been any particular necessity 
of discussing them at all, save in their contrast to 
the maturer poems of the later manner. The second 
volume of the "Contemplations" opens with "Paucse 
Meae," memorial verses to Ldopoldine, among which 
are the best of Hugo's elegies. 1 But only one poem of 
this group rises above the kind of excellence that was 
to be found in the poems of 1840 ; and this, " Les Deux 
cavaliers," 2 is an exception that proves the rule, for it 
was written in 1853. Here indeed, as Brunetiere 
points out, the poet begins to seek his effects less in 
clearness of design and high relief of form than in the 
mingling play of light and shade, in the science of 
chiaroscuro. " He tries to thicken the shadow, to 
flash light on it, and then to let it sink again into its 
obscurity." And the manner here foreshadowed is 
characteristic of all the later poems, and is among the 
causes of their lyric pre-eminence. 

The central subjects of the " Contemplations " of this 
island exile are, not unnaturally, death and the sea, 
both united in the domestic tragedy of Villequier. 
As might be expected, Hugo's notions of the future 
life are generously indefinite. He is sure that death 
is an unfolding of a fuller being, but that does not 
"un teach him to complain," as may be seen in the 
simple pathos of the lines addressed to his wife in 
1855. In the main this reaching out into the un- 
known is confined to " Paucae Mese." In the last part 
the breath of the sea is more felt as daily contact 
with its moods impresses it on his thought; but 

1 For instance, " Trois ans apres," " Yeni, vidi, vici," " A Villequier." 

2 Book iv. no 12. Cp. Brunetiere, Poesie lyrique, ii. 88-97. 



HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TRIUMPH. 243 

while lie sees in it the angry waste, the limitless gulf, 
the infinite sepulchre, yet this very aspect of ocean 
seems to have inspired Hugo, as it did Wordsworth, 
with that fortitude and patient cheer which gave him 
confidence in his genius and his mission, — one might 
be tempted to say, too great confidence, were it not 
that Hugo's estimate of himself anticipated that of 
posterity. He thought — and the mass of Frenchmen 
seem to agree with him — that the poet ought to be a 
shepherd of the people, a curate of souls, and he 
thought, too, that his ideal was fully realized in him- 
self; so through these years of exile he grew more 
intent on the substance of his message, less meticu- 
lous as to its form. Thus his work, alike in form and 
substance, became more intensely individual, the veri- 
table " memoirs of his soul." And we may imagine 
the seer's contempt for the disciples of formal correct- 
ness and polish. He would rather, he said, be " gro- 
tesquely useful " than a literary mandarin, and he 
condensed his scorn of such toying with the eternal 
verities into the words : " The vase that will not go 
to the fountain merits the hoots of the jugs." 

In 1857 Hugo published two volumes of his 
" Legend of the Centuries," which were supplemented 
in 1877 and completed in 1883. 1 Then followed the 
" Chansons des rues et des bois," a true St. Martin's 
summer, a bursting of spring buds before the frosty 
but kindly winter of the poet's old age. There may 
be no genuine passion in these songs, any more per- 
haps than in the " Zuleika " ■ of Goethe's " West-Ost- 
liche Divan ; " but there is a joyous, naive naturalism 
that in spite of occasional lapses of taste is not with- 

1 As the poems of the three publications are redistributed in the 
complete edition, it is more convenient to treat them together later. 



244 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

out a curious charm. The metrical movement, too, is 
wonderfully free and unrestrained. The poet seems 
to renew his youth, and pipes as the linnets sing, with 
easy sylvan familiarity and country good-humor, in idyls 
whose simplicity is marred but rarely by overloaded 
fancy or obtrusive learning. Almost perfect in this kind 
is the " Country Holiday near Paris," 1 with its faintly 
suggested historical background and the bustling city 
left behind. In the " Contemplations " the poet's hom- 
age to Nature had been deep ; here it is gentle, elegiac. 
He watches the sower at dusk, and " feels what must 
be his faith in the useful flight of time." 2 More than 
once this sympathy with the natural instincts and 
purely physical life of man wakens in him an echo 
of the French Eenaissance, and we seem to be listening 
to Eonsard. 

Seven years separate these " Songs of Wayside and 
Wood " from " L' Ann^e terrible," but they are sepa- 
rated by more than time ; for just as his exile had 
stirred his genius to profounder depths between 1852 
and 1859 than were sounded in the next ten years, so the 
terrible months of his country's disaster (from Sedan, 
in September, 1870, to the fiery destruction of the 
Commune in May, 1871, and the poet's brief flight to 
Belgium), the daily memento of defeat in the presence 
of the insolent conquerors, the humiliation of borrowing 
money abroad to buy liberty at home, — all these things 
roused in Hugo emotions as intense as those of 1852, 
and rekindled the wonted fires beneath his seventy 
years. 

But if Hugo had been bitter in his denunciation 
of the triumphant emperor, he scorned, with a noble 
though perhaps a somewhat histrionic magnanimity, to 

1 Chansons, I. iv. 2. 2 lb., II. i. 3. 



HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TRIUMPH. 245 

insult him in defeat. No partisan alloy should mar 
the true ring of his patriotism. His book is a diary, 
reflecting day by day the anguish and the anger of his 
heart at the national humiliation and the fraternal 
strife. He remembers whose son he is, that the play- 
thing of his infancy was the acorn of a sword-hilt. 
If he describes with terrible ghastly vividness the 
deserted battlefields where the dead lie in pools of 
blood, writhed in distorted forms beneath the snow, 
yet he has more envy than pity for those whom fate 
permits to die for their country and not to survive 
its defeat. 1 With true patriotic instinct, in spite of 
all the past eighteen years, he sees in Germany the 
spirit of reaction in jealous combat with the spirit 
of progress and enlightenment, which it now seems to 
the author of the " Scourgings " that France has never 
ceased to represent. He wishes he were not French, 
that he might choose to be so now. 2 Darkness and 
evil have indeed achieved a transitory triumph, but he 
is confident in the victory of the vanquished, — the ul- 
timate conquest of matter by the ideal, of force by 

1 lis gisent dans le champ terrible et solitaire, 
Leur sang fait une mare affreuse sur la terre, 
Les vautours monstrueux fouillent leur ventre ouvert ; 
Leurs corps farouches, froids, epars sur le pre vert, 
Effroyables, tordus, noirs, ont toutes les formes 
Que le tonnerre donne aux foudroyes eno'rmes 



lis sont nus et sanglants sous le ciel pluvieux : 
O morts pour mon pays, je suis votre envieux. 

(L'Annee terrible, Decembre, viii.) 
^ 2 Je voudrais n'etre pas francais pour pouvoir dire 
Que je te choisis, France, et que dans ton martyre, 
Je te proclame, toi que roDge le vautour, 
Ma patrie et ma gloire et mon unique amour. 

(lb., Decembre, vii. Cp. also ix.) 



246 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

reason. Just as a robin has built its nest in the 
mouth of the monumental lion of Waterloo, " peace in 
the horrible jaws of war/' so this defeat shall not be 
ruin but genesis, France shall be a spark to kindle the 
German forest to a blaze that shall enlighten the 
world, and "trembling kings shall see liberty gush 
forth from the lance-thrust in her side." 1 

But into these political visions there comes, like the 
sound of a distant choir, a far-off echo of the domestic 
poems of the " Autumn Leaves ; " for Jeanne, his 
little granddaughter (later Mme. L£on Daudet), shares 
and cheers the weary months of the siege of Paris. 2 
This contrast between the domestic and public life 
of the poet is managed with great effect, and the 
verses on the death of his son (Mars, hi., iv.) pre- 
pare the way for poems whose wide sympathy em- 
braces even the errors of the Communists. " I cannot 
read," pleads an insurgent arrested in his attempt to 
burn the National Library. Hugo is sure that if we 
could penetrate beneath this Communistic rage, we 
should find its discords dissolving into the solemn chant, 
" Let us love one another." In the face of the orgies 
of burning Paris he still resists with all his power the 
" tragic widening of the tomb," he still pleads for the 
abolition of the death penalty. 3 

But if deep calls to deep from the " CMtiments " to 
the "Terrible Year," it is natural that this higher 
inspiration should be less lasting in the aged Hugo, 

1 Et la paix dans la gueule horrible de la guerre . . . 
Est-ce un ecroulement? Non. C'est une genese . . . 

Du coup de lance a ton cote 

Les rois tremblants verront jaillir la liberte. 

(L'Annee terrible, Juillet, iii., xi. 2, and xi. 1.) 

2 lb., Septembre, v., Novembre, x., Janvier, xi., Juin, xviii. 

3 See Avril, v., vi., ix. ; Juin, i., viii., xii., xiii. ; Juillet, ii. 



HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TRIUMPH. 247 

and indeed in his next volume it had quite spent its 
force. " L'Art d'etre grand-pfere " is a continuation and 
development of the poems to Jeanne. Here, with 
childlike, not to say childish simplicity, he tells of 
" the sovereignty of innocent things," and how, " amid 
all our ills that come like veils between us and heaven, 
the contemplation of a deep and starry peace is good 
and healthful to our minds." 1 He watches Jeanne 
asleep, and finds consolation for his political anxieties 
and disappointments in the fancied visions of her in- 
fancy. His grandson Georges entices from him the 
rather banal sentiment that " our sons' sons enrapture 
us." It was well perhaps to write, but was it well to 
print, that toy comedy with its nursery stammerings ? 
But, what is far more serious, many of these poems 
lack the ring of genuine feeling ; and nothing wearies 
more surely or more quickly than the suspicion of 
mock simplicity. Occasionally, indeed, we catch and 
welcome a gleam of politics and even a faint echo of 
satiric thunder, while with the past and the present 
there is mingled in larger measure than heretofore the 
future, the new and possibly regenerate world in 
which these grandchildren will do their life-work. 

The style of these pieces, like their subjects, aims at 
simplicity, but it is not always natural. Short sen- 
tences and elliptical constructions mark all the poetry 
and prose of these later years, but nowhere do they be- 
come such mannerisms as here. Take for instance the 
following lines from a poem on the beach at Guernsey. 

1 Certe il est salutaire et bon pour la pensee 



De contempler parfois a travers tons nos maux, 
Qui sont eutre le ciel et nous comme les voiles, 
Une profonde paix toute faite d'etoiles. 

(L'Art d'etre grand-pere, I. ii.) 



248 MODERN FKENCH LITERATURE. 

Conjunctions are almost wholly suppressed, quite half 
the verbs are omitted, and we get effects like this : 
" Port noises. Whistles of engines under steam. Mili- 
tary music coming in puffs. Bustle on the quay. 
French voices. Merci. Bon jour. Adieu. It must be 
late, for, see ! my red-breast comes close up to me to 
sing. Noise of distant hammers in a forge. Water 
splashes. You hear a steamer puff. A tug enters. 
Immense panting of the sea." 1 Here Hugo is not 
aiming at vigor, but at fresh simplicity. He adapts 
himself easily to his self-imposed limitations, using 
such words and images as he might have used to 
Jeanne or Georges as they tripped along beside him, 
but not wholly without glimpses of the grander 
powers that were revealed that very year in their full 
splendor in the second " Legend of the Centuries." 

This cyclic poem may be best considered here, though 
its concluding part did not appear till six years later. 
Its subject is human progress through all the centuries 
that separate Cain from Eobespierre ; its inspiration a 
robust faith in human destiny, that "sums up all 
aspects of humanity in one vast movement toward the 
light ; " or, as he himself expresses it, his book shows 
" the slow and supreme unfolding of Liberty . . . the 
rising of mankind from the shadow to the ideal." It 
was, as he said, a slow growth, like a cedar-tree made 

1 Bruits de ports. Sifflements des machines chauffees. 
Musique militaire arrivant par bouffees. 
Brouhaha sur le quai. Voix franoaises. Merci. 
Bon jour. Adieu. Sans doute il est tard, car voici 
Que vient tout pres de moi chanter mon rouge-gorge. 
Vacarme de marteaux lointains dans une forge. 
I/eau clapote. On entend haleter un steamer. 
Une mouche entre. Souffle immense de la mer. 

(I/Art d'etre grand-pere, I. ad.) 



HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TRIUMPH. 249 

to endure, and indeed it contains Hugo's best title to 
poetic immortality; for while the later volumes may 
show some falling off in vigor, they bear witness to a 
tenacious persistency in upbuilding the original con- 
ception. To this he introduces the reader by "The 
Vision whence sprang this book" (i. 9) where to his 
typifying mind, that makes each individual a symbol, 
history presents itself as a series of pictures illustrat- 
ing his own ethical creed. One sees here how much 
of the primitive man, of the myth-maker, there was in 
Hugo's nature. 1 To him all human life seems under 
the dominance of a universal antinomy, Fate and God. 
But if this thought lights up the obscurity of his 
" Vision " of the centuries, it is at the expense of their 
continuity. What had first seemed a wall is broken 
into an archipelago on which his fancy sees a charnel 
palace, built by fatality, habited by death, while over 
it hover the wings of hope and the radiance of liberty. 
Out of this vision springs his "Legend of the Cen- 
turies/' his " bird's-eye view of the world." 

He begins naturally with mythology, with Hebrew 
and Indian legends ; then turns to the Olympians and 
their struggle with the Titans, in which he sees the 
conflict of mind with the forces of nature. But in 
vanquishing the powers of earth these gods enjoy only 
a mournful triumph ; for the world has lost its glad- 
ness, the Bacchantes have torn their Orpheus, and 
" the lions mourn the absence of the giants," until 
at last titanic Nature reasserts itself and cries to the 
stupefied Olympians, u g9ds, there is a God." 2 

1 Cp. Lanson, p. 1030. 

2 See " Les Temps paniques " and "Le Titan," especially vol. i. pp. 
77, 78, 80, 94, of the edition definitive, 16mo, to which all subsequent 
references apply. 



250 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

These Greek divinities, creatures of idealist aspira- 
tion, reappear later in the "Legend" as symbolic of the 
optimistic pantheism of the Kenaissance. In "Le 
Satyre " the light-hearted faun, a materialistic hedonist 
with the " immodest innocence of Ehea " (iii. 5), 
confronted by the Olympians, sings unabashed of 
divine chaos, " the eager spouse of the infinite " 
(p. 14), and bids the gods give back to mankind 
the age of gold (p. 15), from which beneath their 
rule the race has degenerated, " burning and ravag- 
ing where it should fertilize " (p. 17). But there 
shall be a renascence from this fatality. Casting 
aside the cloven foot, "man shall usurp the fire, 
mount the throne" (p. 21), the Eeal shall be born 
again, that world which the gods have conquered 
but not comprehended. Then there shall be "place 
for the radiance of the universal soul . . . One light, 
one genius everywhere, an all-embracing harmony." 
And the Faun closes his rhapsody with the cry : 
" Give place to the all ! I am Pan. Jupiter, kneel ! " 
(P- 23). 

Against this intoxication of democracy and arro- 
gance of natural instinct, Hugo introduces Mahomet 
to assert the pre-eminent moral verities, the personal 
oneness of God, and the reality of the higher law. 
Asceticism, too, has its place, though a small one, in 
the poet's vision. Solomon's conclusion that all is 
vanity is turned to his democratic purpose more than 
once 2 to show that if all is not vanity, kings and con- 
querors certainly are. The worm of destruction exists 
to re-establish equality, " to preserve the balance ; " but 

1 For instance, the close of the " Sept merveilles du monde," i. 283, 
and " L'ifcpopee du ver," ii. 3, with " Le Poete au ver," ii. 25. 



HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TRIUMPH. 251 

over " the incorruptible life/' the things of the mind, 
it has no power. 1 

He takes his types of royalty from the monstrosi- 
ties. Xerxes, Clytemnestra, Attila, the French Philippe 
le Bel, the Spaniards Sancho and Alphonso, 2 best suit 
his purpose. Among his heroes the Cid holds the first 
place for his magnanimous loyalty and filial devotion. 3 
With the Franks, Charles and Eoland, 4 are associated 
the less familiar names of Welf, Aymerillot, and Evi- 
radnus, 5 in whom are incorporated the mediaeval or 
possibly Quixotic spirit of men who were " kings in 
India and barons in Europe," when "at the waving 
of their swords the cries of eagles, combats, clarions 
of battle, kings, gods, and epics whirled in the gloom," 
to be silent of grotesquer feats. 6 

Then follow several pieces on the Turks that recall 
the brilliant colors of the " Orientales " thirty years 
before, 7 and introduce vivid pictures of the feudal 
cruelty and oppression that followed the heroic age. 
Such are " Les Quatre jours d'Elciis " (ii. 217), and 
the tragic stories of Angus and of the children of 

1 II faut bien que le ver soit la pour Tequilinre (ii. 9). 
La vie incorruptible est hors de ta frontiere . . » 
Tu n'y peut rien (Le Poete au ver, ii. 25). 

2 i. 109; i. 105; L 125; i. 169; i. 137. 

3 i. 137-161, 209, 233, 249. 

4 i. 207,217; ii. 33. 

5 ii. 193; i. 223; ii. 55. 

6 Rois dans l'lnde ils e^aient en Europe barons, 
Et les aisles, les cris des combats, les clairons, 
Les batailles, les rois, les dieux, les Epopees, 
Tourbillonnent dans 1'ombre au vent de leurs e'pe'es (ii. 30). 
Here too we may find archangels wiping their swords on the clouds 
(ii. 189) and ancient chiefs strangling kings and using their bodies as 
clubs to kill emperors (ii. 92). 

7 Especially Zim-Zizimi (ii. 97) and Sultan Mourad (ii. 111). 



252 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

Isora, 1 whose murderers suffer only from avenging 
Providence, since for such monster kings as Tiphaine 
and Eadbert there is no justice on earth. In more 
modern times the Armada evokes a noble poem (iii. 41), 
there are fierce satires on royalty and especially on 
Napoleon III. that recall the finest lines of " Les CM- 
timents," 2 while the glories of the First Empire are 
recalled by the memory of his father's magnanimity 
and of his uncle's heroism, and by the return of the 
ashes of the great Emperor (iv. 23). 3 Here, too, are 
utterances of the noblest patriotism, together with 
pathetic pictures of childhood and somewhat nebulous 
pseudo-philosophic visions. 4 

Though the " Legend " is ostensibly epic, there runs 
through it all a personal element that allies it to lyric 
verse ; and, as Brunetifere remarks, this has influenced 
the choice of subjects as well as their treatment. The 
passion of the poet is nearly always to be felt, his 
thesis nearly always obvious. So the whole lacks the 
serenity of a true epic, the more because the poet's 
convictions are less intellectual than moral. He is 
borne along by his feelings, not the master of them ; 
he is less a Baconian observer than an Orphic seer, 
a sort of " primordial force ; " but these are the very 
qualities that make him, as the same keen critic ob- 

1 I/Aigle du casque, ii. 137 ; La Confiance du marquis Fabriee, ii* 
165. 

2 E. g., Les Mangeurs, iii. 109 ; La Colere du bronze, addressed par- 
ticularly to Moray, iv. 67 ; and Le Prisonnier (Bazaine), iv. 85. In 
"La Vision de Dante," iv. 139, Pius IX. is made to share the bad emi- 
nence of Napoleon. 

3 Apres la bataille, iv. 51 ; Le Cimetiere d'Eylau, iv. 55. 

4 E. g., L'Elegie des fleaux, iv. 97 ; Apres les fourches claudines, iv. 
89 ; Le Crapaud, iv. 131 ; Les Petits, iv. 197 ; Vingtieme siecle, iv. 217 ; 
La Trompette de jugement, iv. 247. 



HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TRIUMPH. 253 

serves, " not perhaps the greatest poet, but the greatest 
lyrist of all time." 

More directly, though hardly more profoundly, philo- 
sophic than the " Legend," are four poems, published 
between 1878 and 1880, — " Le Pape," " Eeligions et la 
religion," "L'Ane," and " La Piti<3 supreme," which may 
be considered together so far as they need to be consid- 
ered at all. The first of them is the least unintelligible. 
His ideal Pope should symbolize the eternal conscience 
of God, should unite all the elements of idealism and 
virtue as Hugo conceives them. He should abandon 
all human pomp and pride, leave Rome itself, and 
having rebuked, like his Master, the sycophants of 
the East, should stoop to the lowliest charity, gather 
in his train the outcast and the poor, reconcile men 
and nations, preach the mutual duty of rich and poor, 
of aid and of gratitude, advocate Christian socialism, 
condemn capital punishment and retaliation, and, in 
short, realize Hugo's idea of a true "Imitation of 
Christ," such as he thought illustrated by himself. 

" Religions and Religion " undertakes to show that 
any creed narrowly comprehended by human prejudice 
is worse in its effect on moral character than all un- 
belief. The counterpart of this paradox is presented 
in " L'Ane," which would prove that false science is 
worse than none ; and having fallen into the paradoxi- 
cal vein, Hugo borrows another from Danton to make 
us believe, in " La Pitid supreme," that the executioner 
is more worthy of pity than the victim. Even the 
poet's most enthusiastic admirers are wont to glide 
lightly over these errors of the old man eloquent. 

Hugo had still in his portfolios materials for the last 
volume of his " Legend " and for " Les Quatre vents de 
l'esprit," parts of which are as good as all but his very 



254 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

best. As its title suggests, this last of the poet's col- 
lections shows his work in the four fields of satire, 
drama, the lyric, and the epic. The first is, as usual, the 
best ; for he is right in saying that " hatred of evil and 
love of the just had been the weapons of his youth, 
and his shields contempt and disdain," with which he 
had striven to battle against every oppressor of mind 
and body. 1 Perhaps the most interesting among these 
pieces is the final statement of his attitude toward the 
established Church and his once cherished middle ages 
(i. 111). This confession of faith or of the lack of it sur- 
prises at once by its vigor, its boldness, and its nebulous 
indefiniteness. Admirable, too, is his picture of a rich 
church-warden who " knows that a good God is quite 
essential to keep the hungry people quiet," and is " proud 
to feel that in his devotion he is taking the masses in 
his leash and God under his patronage." 2 One dwells 
the longer on this first part because Hugo's dramatic 
"wind" blows with much less vigor, and hardly ad- 
vances the little skiff of his genius toward the ever- 
fleeting goal of his dramatic ambition. 

The lyric section, like the satiric, embraces the work 
of forty years, and hence of very varied moods. There 
are poems where all Nature has a gloomy voice and the 

1 Vol. i. pp. 5, 25 (edition of 1882, to which reference is hereafter 
made). 

2 i. 34. The lines cited are : — 

C'est que le peuple vil croira, le voyant croire, 
C'est qu'il faut abrutir ces gens, car ils ont faim, 
C'est qu'un bon dieu quelconque est n^cessaire enfin. 
La-dessus rangez-vous, le Suisse frappe, il entre, 
II £tale au banc d'ceuvre un majestueux ventre, 
Fier de sentir qu'il prend dans sa devotion, 
Le peuple en laisse et Dieu sous sa protection. 

Noteworthy also are " Idolatries et philosophies " (i. 118) and No. XXV. 

(i. 96). 



HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TRIUMPH. 255 

sea is still speaking to him of L^opoldine, while in his 
exquisite " Walks among the Eocks " the conviction of 
divine goodness and love reaches its supreme expres- 
sion. 1 The epic section, finally, is a series of brilliant 
evocations and half-lyric denunciations of the short- 
comings of royalty, ending like " Les Chatiments " with 
a bright vision of the future. 

A drama, " Torquemada," closes the long series of 
works given to the press by Hugo, who seems to have 
regarded it, as Goethe did the second part of " Faust," 
as a sort of final legacy to the world, " his grandest con- 
ception," the product of the reflections of thirty years. 
He certainly overestimated it ; for though it has many 
great beauties, it is quite unsuited to the stage, as are 
also his posthumous dramas of " Le Theatre en liberte." 
The culminating scene of this poem of toleration, the 
plea of the Grand Eabbi before their Catholic Majes- 
ties Ferdinand and Isabella, is indeed a masterpiece of 
pathetic eloquence. But the work should be classed 
with the philosophic pieces rather than with the 
dramas, and so leads us naturally to his posthumous 
* Fin de Satan," an unfinished epic of the French Eevo- 
lution, to which Hugo, like most of his countrymen, 
accords a cardinal place in the development of the 
human mind and of society. 

Here the venerable poet tells how Satan had made 
of the three weapons of Cain, the nail, the rod, and the 
stone, three germs of crime, the sword, the gibbet, and 
the prison, with which he purposed to disfigure the face 
of the world. But a white plume, a remnant of Lucifer's 
glory, remained in heaven, and under the glance of God 
became the angel Liberty, who overcomes not only the 
results of evil but its very spirit; for Satan himself, 

1 Vol. ii. pp. 67, 74, 150. 



256 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

after a mighty struggle, sends her on her work to break 
the Bastille, to release its skeleton captives, to foster 
innocent love, and to emancipate mankind. An unfin- 
ished section, " Le Gibet," on the life and death of 
Christ has parts equal in vigor to any previous work 
of the poet ; but, as is admitted even by Swinburne, the 
material framework of Hugo's whole conception is " so 
self-contradictory, so inconsistent in its accumulation 
of incompatible impossibilities, that we cannot even 
imagine a momentary and fantastical acceptance of it." 

Of four other posthumous volumes, " Toute la lyre " 
and "Le Theatre en liberty," it has been said that if 
they add nothing to the glory of Hugo, neither do they 
detract from. it. Indeed they inspire a kind of awe at 
the huge volume of his perennial productivity, — his 
" enormous torrent of speech," to borrow his own phrase 
of Danton. So far as political, social, or literary ideas 
are concerned, the thirty thousand lines of the former 
work only repeat what he had already said many times, 
much of which was commonplace before he said it at 
all. There is the familiar regiphobia, the belief in 
fraternity, progress, perfectibility, and the naive desire 
that he and his Maker should come to a better under- 
standing for the good of the human race. Here as 
always, perhaps more than ever, he feels his apostleship 
and its burdens, and proclaims both with an exasper- 
ating iteration of the capital I. 

If now we consider Hugo's place in French literature, 
one is tempted, with Lemaitre, to call him " the mighti- 
est gatherer of words since the world began." But it 
needs not that critic's acuteness to discover that there 
is far too much repetition in his work, and, after " Les 
Chatiments," little intellectual development. The fact 
is that the young Hugo had said all he had to say in 



HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TEIUMPH. 257 

or before the " Autumn Leaves," and the second Hugo 
had delivered his whole message before 1860. On the 
other hand, if we look at his work from the rhetorical 
standpoint, his management of words and images, there 
is no loss, perhaps there is gain, to the very last. 1 

Hugo was distinctly an average man both intellectu- 
ally and ethically. He had the rancor and vanity of 
the typical bourgeois, his treasure was in an earthen 
vessel, his genius wholly disproportioned to his mind. 
Hence he constantly laid himself open to ridicule and 
parody by fatuously ignoring innate congruity and his- 
torical perspective. It is as though Elijah's mantle had 
fallen on the typical philistine to whom the Bevolu- 
tion divides darkness from light, and u humanity is an 
immense Punch and Judy show." 2 So utterly naive 
is his self-complacency that he seems to himself to be 
Mont Blanc, or Atlas, or a "torch enlightening the 
world." But at the same time he has the good qualities 
of the bourgeois. He seems thoroughly sincere in his 
domestic affections, and he did not relax the sustained 
ardor of his literary labor for sixty-nine years, practising 
what he had preached, " amending old works by making 
better ones " that were not always new. 

It would be foolish to attempt a history of Hugo's 
ideas. " They follow, but do not beget, one another." 
He reflects De Vigny's philosophy of history, Gautier's 
Neo-Hellenism, and the social sympathies of Sand and 
Michelet. Indeed, his convictions and his philosophy 
are no more essential elements in his literary individ- 

1 Cp. Lemaitre, Contemporains, iv. 132, to whom I am also much 
indebted in what follows. 

2 This is the point of Lemaitre's epigrammatic " Homais a Path- 
mos." Veuillot's " Jocrisse a Pathmos," alluding to the senile loves 
of the " Chansons des rues et des bois," has a sharper sting. 

17 



258 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

uality than is the color of the chameleon. What is his, 
and his only, is the way in which he expresses them, 
— his rhetoric, his prosody, that gathers up thought 
as in a prism and divides it into rainbow hues. For 
he is truly golden -mouthed. "No poet of ancient or 
modern times has had the imagination of form in such 
abundance, force, precision, grandeur," says Lemaitre. 
" He, more than any other, had the glory of rejuvenat- 
ing the imagination and renewing the language of his 
century." 

Here his work is less contestable than in politics or 
sociology ; and it is here alone that his literary influ- 
ence has been great and lasting. It is necessary, then, 
to examine briefly wherein lies the new in Hugo's 
rhetoric and in his management of verse. And, first 
of all, one observes that if Hugo has a conspicuous 
lack of humor, he has a certain kind of wit that shows 
itself in a keen relish for sharp contrasts. 1 The most 
superficial study of his metaphors illustrates this. 
None but he in France would "put a liberty cap on 
the dictionary " and " crush the spirals of paraphrase," 
or "make the oratorical style shiver in its Spanish 
ruff." 2 Such wit is never lofty, but it is often effec- 
tive. Yet, on the other hand, this delight in incon- 
gruity, coupled with his lack of humor, has betrayed 
him more than once into grotesque lapses of taste. 
But whether bridled or free, his intense feeling and 
vivid imagination poured into the language a stream 
of images, new or forgotten, that broaden from the 

1 From this point to the close of the chapter I am much beholden 
to Faguet, xix. siecle. 

2 Contemplations, I. i. 7. The whole piece, "Reponse a un acte 
d'accnsation," and also "Apropos d'Horace" (I. i. 13) abound in 
similar phrases. 



HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TKIUMPH. 259 

" Orientales " to the " Contemplations," and form the 
mirror of Hugo's peculiar glory. They are evolved 
from no mental elaboration ; they seem to spring from 
direct sensations, as though each thought were born in 
his mind with a train of attendant similes. Indeed, 
he is embarrassed by his own exuberance. He sees so 
much, so many suggestions of comparison leap to his 
mind, that the reader will often be dazzled by his 
fulness or perhaps shocked by a mixed metaphor. 1 
And yet, if Proteus will, which is not often, he can 
drop this garment stiff with embroidery and gold, and 
write in the sustained periods and polished simplicity 
of the Classicists. If we regard only the expression, 
the mode, Hugo is unsurpassed, not alone in his own 
peculiar style, but in almost every other. 

And this applies almost as much to his prosody. 
He was not only a compeller of words, but a master 
of metre and rhythm, and here at least a master that 
never nodded. So perfect was his ear for melody that 
a study of his metres is almost a complete course in 
French verse. Men with greater pretensions have 
built on his foundations ; but neither Banville nor 
Verlaine shows a more delicate instinct of the relation 
of sound and sentiment than Hugo. He has at his 
command a whole tonic scale of vowel effects, " from 
grave to gay, from lively to severe," and he knows 
Wagner's art of drawing harmony from discord, though 
his delicate shadings will often elude even a trained 
foreign ear, and mock the artifices of the modern Sym- 
bolists who try to reduce to rule what Hugo attained 
by instinct. He made his rhymes and his metres, as 
in French verse they should be, the maid-servants of 
rhythm. He did not, as he once declared, " put that 
1 See Faguet, 1. c. p. 226, for numerous examples. 



260 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

great stupid alexandrine out of joint." Quite other- 
wise. He gave it new life and elasticity by a wise 
liberty that he never suffered to degenerate into license. 
He made it so flexible, gave it such variety, that it 
could serve the most manifold needs. But while he 
thus enlarged the functions of this classic form, no 
one knew so well as he in an endless variety of lyric 
metres to give orchestration to his themes, to adapt 
cadence to sentiment and rhyme to reason, if indeed 
he does not sometimes make the one do duty for the 
other. For if we can be deaf to its charm, we shall 
almost always see, even in the best of Hugo's poetry, 
a certain haziness of thought that escapes an ultimate 
analysis. 

In his rendering of emotion Hugo is uneven, as all 
who attain the highest reaches are sure to be. He 
feels so intensely about some things that he sacrifices 
clearness to passion, and this excited expression is 
apt to follow him as a mannerism where he feels very 
little ; but where he is too deeply stirred to be artifi- 
cial and yet keeps his self-control, he is wholly admi- 
rable. As a poet of love he seems least spontaneous, 
perhaps because, having married the choice of his 
youth, he found for this sentiment other outlets than 
the presses of his publisher. The fireside pieces that 
alternate with the amorous ditties in the " Autumn 
Leaves " give the latter a very hollow sound ; and in 
the old man's " Chansons " there is less passion than 
joy of life. 

But if here he is artificial or cold, his political 
satires, though not without lines of incoherent pas- 
sion, show him at his best, and perhaps supreme 
among poets because of his absolute though incon- 
sistent sincerity. The pathetic memorials of Villequier 



HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TBIUMPH. 261 

also are genuine in feeling and good in a lesser kind. 
But later there grew to be something mechanical in 
his harping on the pathetic string, and in " L'Art d'etre 
grand-pkre" it sinks at times to a senile puerility. 

The whole Republican movement that culminated 
in 1848 had been nursed in glittering generalities. 
Of that generation Hugo is a type, perhaps an extreme 
type. No one talks more persistently than he of jus- 
tice, humanity, progress, liberty, the people, the repub- 
lic, the sublime verities ; but he is at no pains to tell 
us what he means by these very indefinite terms. 
His nebulous socialism reminds one of the "general 
warmth" of Jean Paul. He likes to talk of great 
thinkers, of whose company he clearly regards himself 
the leader ; and he indulges in lists of them that make 
the judicious grieve, for they show that they were to 
him little more than names, while he was so out of 
touch with the scientific thought of his later years 
that he made no effort to understand the evolutionists 
he affected to despise. 1 Now, as Faguet observes, many 
great poets have had as few new ideas as Hugo ; but 
none of them ever persistently proclaimed that they 
were pre-eminently men of ideas, — that the poet was 
by nature prophet, torch, trumpet, as Hugo loved to 
call himself, though he might rather be likened to 
an seolian harp, changing his note with each new politi- 
cal breeze. And yet Hugo is always as sure of his 
unchanging consistency as that he is about to proclaim 
an oracle when he reiterates a commonplace. 2 

What literary leadership or constructive criticism 

1 For instance, "La Legende des siecles," iv. 175 sqq. 

2 See Faguet, 1. c. p. 183, who shows that Hugo never led nor 
shared in the creation of popular sentiments, but always followed and 
reflected them. 



262 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

was to be expected of such a man ? At what did he 
aim, and what did he attain ? Again the early and 
the later Hugo are as wide asunder as the poles. The 
preface to " Cromwell " assures us that " human history 
presents no poetry save as judged from the height of 
monarchical ideas." His exile was to reveal to him 
that " Komanticism and Socialism were identical," and 
he calmly asserted that he had been a Socialist since 
1828. But before as well as after the coup d'etat 
he was possessed with the fixed idea that the man of 
letters in general, and himself in particular, could be 
and ought to be a popular leader, — a view that seems 
derived from Madame de Stael's theory that " literature 
is the expression of society." This may explain why 
his own work has nearly always a social thesis clearly 
denned, while his direct literary criticism is the ex- 
treme of vague impressionism. Here he was as in- 
ferior to Gautier as he was superior to him as a poet. 

Hugo's originality, then, is in his form. He is 
classic, because he expresses the ideas of everybody in 
the language of the elect. Herein lies the secret of 
his democratic popularity : he glorifies the common- 
place, social, moral, philosophic ; he transfigures it by 
his imagery, till he gives it a new meaning without 
taking from it its familiarity. Herein lies the excuse 
and the reason for the repetitions .of his later volumes. 
The range of the commonplace is naturally limited; 
but his amplifications and brilliant illustration of his 
trite discoveries are so rich as almost to make his old 
truth seem new. He is also wonderfully vivid in his 
direct descriptions, and the strength of his dramas is 
in " local color " rather than in character, in picture 
rather than in narrative. But far more remarkable than 
this is the poetic personification of inanimate objects. 



HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TRIUMPH. 263 

He imparts a more genuine life and individuality to 
his ISTotre-Dame than to Esmeralda or Frollo, less to 
Gilliatt than to the rocks on which he won his tragic 
triumph. Chateaubriand and Lamartine had fore- 
shadowed this art, but Hugo first realized potentialities 
that were pushed by Zola perhaps beyond their natural 
limits. 1 

It is clear that these are epic qualities ; and Hugo 
would be a great epic poet if his intrusive egoism did 
not constantly mar the impersonality of his narration. 
But in this attempt to fuse the epic with the lyric the 
latter dominates, because of his exquisite feeling for 
form and his love of it for its own sake. He delights 
in symmetrical arrangements, in parallels not alone 
of phrases, but of strophes and even of whole poems, 
which he places over against one another ; he revels in 
such prosodical tours, de force as the " Pas d'armes du 
roi Jean " or " Les Djinns," in development by multi- 
plied images, and in striking rhetorical effects of 
antithesis and climax. 

Intellectually Hugo is related to De Stael ; as an 
artist he has more of Chateaubriand. He is more pur- 
poseful than Lamartine, more robust than De Vigny ; 
his personal will is more obvious, his effort more 
laborious and sustained. He has his eye more con- 
stantly on the public, and would not gladly " reserve 
his laurels for posterity," that, as Byron remarks, " does 
not always claim the bright reversion." He is a great 
writer rather than a great author, but his faults are of 
the kind that will least affect his popularity. For 
these are obvious only to the cultured, but his merits 
appeal to all, and especially to the democratic masses, 
in whom he rouses vague sympathies that others will 
1 See chap. xii. 



264 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

translate into action. More than any French lyric 
or epic poet that preceded him, and more than any 
that has yet followed, he continues to hold the great 
public. All schools of modern verse that have arisen 
in the last-half century may call him " father," and he 
will long continue to form the rhetorical and poetical 
taste of French youth. And it is well that it should 
be so; for, as one of the younger critics of our day has 
said, " While others have troubled, weakened, disen- 
chanted the human heart, Hugo has reassured, estab- 
lished, encouraged it. He has communicated to it 
something of his own robust and obstinate virtue." 1 

1 Pellissier, p. 277. 



THE EVOLUTION OF HISTORY AND CRITICISM. 265 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE EVOLUTION OF HISTORY AND CRITICISM. 

It has been said that during the latter period of his 
life Hugo barred but did not deflect the current of 
literary evolution. We have now to examine what 
was the nature and direction of that current ; and if, 
as seems certain, the predominating influence has been 
scientific, it is by studying those departments of litera- 
ture that are most closely related to science that we 
shall gain the clew to the course of development in the 
regions of pure art. Never has literature been more 
under the influence of philosophy, never have critics 
been more frankly recognized as the guides and repre- 
sentatives of French culture. It is to these that the 
literature of our scientific age looks for guidance and 
inspiration, just as the Romantic period lent the intox- 
ication of its imagination to history, which under the 
new spirit has almost ceased to belong to literature 
at all. The Romantic historians, then, will form the 
most suitable starting-point for an investigation of 
the general trend of poetry, drama, and fiction during 
the generation of Hugo's exile and triumph. 1 

One of the direct results of the impulse given to 
letters by De Stael and Chateaubriand was the enfran- 

1 Of course it is only with historians, philosophers, or critics, in 
their relation to literature, that we have to do ; hence Cousin and Comte 
are passed over, while Taine and Renan take a prominent place ; hence, 
too, Michelet occupies the chief place among historians, while Martin 
is not named. 



266 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

chisement of historical curiosity, for one cannot yet 
call it science; and this curiosity was greatly stimulated 
by the political conditions that accompanied the rise 
of the Romantic School. In the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries history, even that of France, had 
been much neglected ; but the children of the Revolu- 
tion were eager to know the wrongs and struggles of 
their ancestors, and hailed with enthusiasm the ro- 
mances of Walter Scott and Chateaubriand's brilliant 
"Martyrs." Signs of an historical revival multiply 
in the decade preceding the Revolution of 1830. 
Great collections of memoirs were printed ; 2 and these, 
with the accumulated treasures of the Benedictines, 
were philosophically and scientifically analyzed by 
Guizot and De Tocqueville, who belong rather to 
history than to literature, as do Thiers and Mignet, 
though the latter has much art in the luminous 
grouping of details. 

Sucli part of the work of Augustin Thierry 2 as was 
inspired by his sympathy with the bourgeois monarchy 
of the Orleanists falls also outside our limits, but he 
was early diverted by the affectionate study of mediae- 
val documents to a more artistic end. He who had 
spent his youth devouring the pages of Chateaubriand 
and his young manhood in the eager study of Walter 
Scott, in whom, as he himself tells us, " Ivanhoe " 
caused transports of enthusiasm, was now to com- 
municate that same enthusiasm to his countrymen by 
his " Stories of the Merovingians " and his " Conquest 

1 Some two hundred and thirty volumes in all, among them the 
Memoires de Saint-Simon. 

2 Born 1 795 ; died 1856. The " Lettres sur l'histoire de France" 1827, 
"Etudes historiques," 1834, and " Histoire du tiers-etat," 1853, hardly 
belong to literature. 



THE EVOLUTION OF HISTORY AND CRITICISM. 267 

of England." It was his mission, he said, " to plant 
in France the banner of historical reform, to wage 
war alike on the writers without learning to see and 
the writers without imagination to reproduce," who 
" travestied facts, denaturalized characters, and overlaid 
all with a color as vague as it was false." The seven- 
teenth century had treated history as literature, the 
eighteenth called it philosophical ; Thierry made it 
scientific by a profound study of the sources, and lit- 
erary by the life with which he infused the relics of 
a forgotten past. To Voltaire Merovingian history 
had been a " bear-garden." Thierry's imagination con- 
structed from it a series of elaborate pictures to which 
every available document had contributed its detail 
of feature, dress, or manners ; while to it all he added a 
sympathy with the people and with the popular cause 
that would have been impossible in pre-Eevolutionary 
France. 

The same picturesqueness is found in Barante, and 
the same sympathy with the oppressed ; but the great- 
est evoker of the past that the Eomantic School or 
indeed France ever produced is Michelet, 1 who both 
by birth and sympathy represented the democratic 
and anti-clerical masses, as Guizot and Thiers did the 
Orleanist bourgeoisie. But in him more than in any 
other historian of France literary imagination inter- 

1 Born 1798 ; died 1874. He was the son of a printer of Paris, and 
began literary work by a summary, " Precis de l'histoire moderne, 1828." 
His most noteworthy historical works are : Proces des templiers, 1841- 
1852; La Sorciere, 1862 ; Histoire de Prance, 28 vols., 1833-1867; 
Histoire du xix. siecle, 1876 ; and outside the historical field, L'Oiseau, 
1856; L'Insecte, 1857; L'Amour, 1858; La Femme, 1859; La Mer, 
1861 ; La Montagne, 1868. 

Criticism: Corread, Michelet (Classiques populaires) ; Faguet, xix. 
siecle ; Saintsbury, in Encylopaedia Britannica. 



268 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

penetrates and vivifies vast erudition, till in the alembic 
of his mind documents become poetry and history 
intuition. At the rifled cathedral tombs of Saint Denis 
he feels and makes us feel the dead kings beneath the 
marble slabs, till like genii they rise before our fancy, — 
Dagobert, Chilperic, and " the fair, the blond, the ter- 
rible Fredegonde." His palpitating sympathy makes 
him contemporary of each epoch as he writes of it. He 
thrills now with the faith of Bernard, now with the 
patriotism of the Maid of Orleans ; with the Eef orma- 
tion he becomes a Protestant, and a democratic icono- 
clast with the Revolution. Like Carlyle, he is always 
present in his history, explaining, animating, pleading. 
The rush of his narration so carries away the reader that 
serious omissions pass unheeded and inaccuracies of 
style are forgiven. The whole is delightful, stimulating, 
for all its obvious faults of proportion, and in spite of 
special pleading that would be disingenuous if one 
did not feel that with him, as with Carlyle, the preju- 
dice and the hate are part of the man that it would 
change his whole nature to eliminate. 

To him France is an entity, a living being. It is 
" a soul and a personality " of which he undertakes the 
history. Hence he is led to study with peculiar care 
those traces that climate and physical environment 
have left on racial character. He delights to paint 
the common people in their daily life, making the 
heroic natural and the sublime comprehensible by the 
minute reality of his sympathetic art, that from myriad 
documentary details could give past centuries new 
birth. Through his official position as guardian of the 
National Archives he found open to him an almost 
unexplored mine, rich in precious details of mediaeval 
manners, which under another's hand might have re- 



THE EVOLUTION OF HISTOEY AND CRITICISM. 269 

mained as dry as the dust that had gathered on them, 
but beneath his touch, transformed by his imagination 
and irradiated by his unique style, charmed the world 
by their unexpected revelations. 

It was natural that his romantic and lyric genius 
should show itself best where it had greatest scope, in 
the middle ages. The episodes of Saint Louis, of the 
Albigensian crusade, and especially the chapters on 
Joan of Arc, with the superb "tableau de France" 
that opens the second volume of his history, are proba- 
bly the finest portions of all the vast work. Very 
characteristic too of Michelet's genius are his curious 
study of the trial of the Knights-Templars, and that 
rhapsody of demonology, " La Sorcifere," whose first 
part has been justly called a "nightmare of extra- 
ordinary verisimilitude and poetic power." But unfor- 
tunately, before he had completed this period of his 
history, a second and much less happy manner was 
inaugurated by a course of lectures against the Jesuits 
delivered at the College de France in 1838. These were 
so violent that the government felt forced to inter- 
fere, but not until the agitation had attained a popu- 
larity that is reflected in Sue's well-known " Juif errant " 
(1844-1845). But though in these lectures the dem- 
ocrat and the Huguenot get the better of the historian, 
the eccentricity of his arguments has not affected their 
eloquence or their sincerity. Yet it is clear that from 
this time his work grows more partisan, and by its 
plebeian and anti-clerical fanaticism loses somewhat 
in interest and still more in historical value, though 
it gained in immediate effect, for its exaggerated sym- 
bolism flattered and fostered the aspirations of the 
Socialists of 1848. Now and again such deeds as the 
taking of the Bastille will evoke his old poetic vision ; 



270 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

but he seldom speaks of the Revolution, or even of the 
Benascence, without suffering party passion to mar the 
calm beauty of his picture. He even came to apologize 
for his treatment of the middle ages, fearing that he 
had been too sympathetic with the Christian spirit. 1 
It has been epigram ma tically said of him that he for- 
got his history when he wrote politics, but not his 
politics when he wrote history. 

His political views drove him from his archives 
and his professor's chair after Napoleon's coup d'etat ; 
and this was not without gain to literature, for his 
poetic spirit found inexhaustible consolation in studies 
of nature. Not in Chateaubriand nor in Saint-Pierre 
shall we find the sensitive sympathy that thrills 
through Michelet's prose poems of " The Bird," " The 
Insect," "The Sea," and "The Mountain." But here 
too he fell, as the French proverb has it, in the direc- 
tion to which he inclined ; and the vices of his quali- 
ties are painfully manifest in "L' Amour" and "La 
Femme," errors from which a more developed sense of 
humor would surely have saved him. It is to these 
studies aside from the main work of his life that " La 
Sorcikre " belongs, and also the posthumous " Banquet," 
a most vigorous and specious socialistic pamphlet. 

Michelet's historical style is more striking than 
flowing. It advances by leaps and bounds, not by 
careful development. Its succession of vivid evoca- 
tions appeals primarily to the emotions, and their 
power lies not in the thought alone, but also in its 
rhythmic expression. Such staccato sentences produce 
their best effect when read aloud with oratorical em- 
phasis. But when with a poet's fancy he writes of 

1 A curious witness to his anti-Christian violence is contained in 
"Revue bleue," June, 1895 (p. 731). 



THE EVOLUTION OF HISTORY AND CRITICISM. 271 

nature, or perchance of physio-psychology, his style 
becomes more supple, undulating, musical, less ob- 
viously rhetorical, more subtly rhythmical, of indefina- 
ble charm and exquisite art. These are qualities that 
will assure Michelet an enduring place in the litera- 
ture of his generation when the histories of his more 
cautious and impartial but less picturesque contem- 
poraries shall have been superseded by still closer 
diplomatic investigations, and yet more rigid applica- 
tion of that historical method which has been a natural 
and inevitable result of the scientific evolution. Ours 
is the history of a Naturalistic period. Michelet, 
whether he would or no, was more than any other 
the Eomantic historian. 

The Naturalistic evolution has doubtless been a gain 
to history as a science, but it has been at the cost of 
its literary value. The new spirit of accurate analysis 
admits of no generalizing theorists like Guizot, and 
would smile at such lyrists as Michelet. It subordi- 
nates with a stern self-abnegation the dulce to the 
utile. We have great historical investigators, great 
historians perhaps in modern France, but not a great 
historical literature. 1 The scientific spirit has carried 
its analysis so far that a just synthesis becomes al- 
most beyond human grasp. Never have single move- 
ments or periods been studied with more zeal or acu- 
men; yet our diligent investigators do not command 
the place in literature or in popular esteem that was 
won by their Eomantic predecessors. 

But while history was being thus transformed, an 
evolution as fundamental and even more important to 

1 Taine's " Ancien regime " is not history so much as philosophical 
criticism of history. Louis Blanc's voluminous work belongs rather to 
the category of demagogic declamation. 



272 MODEEN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

the development of literature had shown itself in 
criticism. Literary historians and self-constituted law- 
givers there had been since the days of the Pleiad, and 
they had been men of no mean talent and industry, 
but they lacked the scientific spirit and the compara- 
tive method that are the peculiar boast of modern 
French criticism and give it a unique place in the 
literatures of Europe. Nowhere else do we find that 
criticism attracted such talents or gained such rewards 
both of money and of fame. It is therefore of peculiar 
interest to trace the brief evolution of this genre in 
France, the more as it is here that we must seek the 
key to past development and the clew to the imme- 
diate future. 1 

French comparative criticism may be said to begin 
for history with Voltaire's " Essay on Manners " and 
for sociology with Montesquieu's "Spirit of Laws." 
But it was not till the eve of our own century that 
Madame de Stael applied these principles to books in 
her " Literature Considered in its Connection with 
Social Constitutions " (1800), and enforced the lesson 
with her ripest powers in " L'Allemagne " (1813). 
She first made criticism cosmopolitan, and her method 
was continued by Barante (1782-1866), and then, more 
ably, by Villemain (1790-1870), who was supreme in 
this field from the Eestoration till the rise of Eoman- 
ticism. He taught, as Madame de Stael had done, 
that literature was the expression of society, and 
he sought to prove this by elaborate though partial 
and superficial studies of the middle ages and of the 

1 See Emile Faguet in Petit de Julleville, Histoire de la langue et 
de la litterature francaise, viii. 358-440, and Hatzfeld and Meunier, 
Les Critiques litteraires du xix. siecle, Introduction, which distin- 
guishes aesthetic, moral, historic, and psychologic criticism, and favors 
a fusion of them all. 



THE EVOLUTION OF HISTORY AND CRITICISM. 273 

eighteenth century. But his learning had much more 
breadth than depth, and the comparative method be- 
trayed him at times into shallow generalizations. Still, 
Villemain is always interesting and sometimes stirring, 
as might be expected from a professor of eloquence in 
the national university. But with the founding of the 
" Globe " and the gathering of the Cenacles the current 
of criticism divides. One branch lingers in the sluggish 
channels of an objective dogmatism, that suits so well 
the love of system and logic deeply rooted in French 
character ; while the other branch, full of the subjec- 
tive spirit that had been the chief factor in the Eo- 
mantic reform, sacrifices dogma to intuition and some- 
times consistency to freedom. 

Among the representatives of the objective group 
Nisard (1806-1888) led the forlorn hope of the deca- 
dent Classicists, 1 while the Swiss Protestant, Vinet, 
sought a similar objective standard in morals. Thus 
both persisted in measuring literature by abstract 
rules, by absolute canons of art or ethics ; and both 
turned their eyes with dogmatic steadfastness from the 
personality of the author whose work they criticised. 
" I could not love/' said Nisard, " without preferring, 
and I could not prefer without doing injustice." This 
cold, martinet spirit marks itself in them and in their 
successors by impatience of irregular genius. It has 
always sought its ideals in the cold correctness of the 
School of 1660. Nisard and all who have followed 
him, especially Brunetifere, feel and show^ a haughty 
contempt for the generous but sometimes inconsistent 
appreciations of those who base their critical opinions 
on subjective impressions. Criticism like Nisard's is 
an art that can be taught; subjective criticism is 

1 E. g., in the " Litterature frai^aise," 1844-1849, and 1861. 
18 



274 MODEEN FKENCH LITERATURE. 

from its nature individual, good, or valueless accord- 
ing to the critic. Of this school Sainte-Beuve was the 
creator and is still the unchallenged master. 

It was the good fortune of the Eomanticists to 
count almost from the first in their inner circle, and 
always among their sympathizers, one of the greatest 
critics of all time, one of the most generously apprecia- 
tive, catholic-minded men that France has broiight 
forth. None of them exercised a wider or more bene- 
ficent influence. Born at Boulogne of half-English 
parentage, Sainte-Beuve (1804-1869) a made brilliant 
medical studies at Paris, began in 1824 to write for " Le 
Globe " short critical articles, the present " Premiers 
lundis," and in 1827 found his true vocation on its 
critical staff. Warm sympathy earned him the friend- 
ship of Hugo, and his genius won the praise of Goethe. 
To his work in these apprentice years is due, more 
than to that of any man else, the revival of an intel- 
ligent interest in the sixteenth century, and especially 
in Eonsard, a selection from whose works he edited in 
1828. Such studies stirred his own poetic vein, and, 
led perhaps by the feeling that he would criticise better 
what he had himself attempted, he published in 1829 
" La Vie, poesies et pens£es de Joseph Delorme," a sort 
of Jacobin Werther-Een^, for whose sentimental sorrows 

1 Critical works : Tableau historique de la poesie francaise au xvi. 
sieele, 1828 ; Critiques et portraits litteraires, 5 vols., 1832-1839 ; Port- 
Royal, 5 vols., 1840-1860; Portraits litteraires, 2 vols., 1844; Portraits 
contemporains, 2 vols., 1846; Chateaubriand et son groupe litteraire, 
sous Fempire, 2 vols., 1860; Causeries du lundi, 15 vols., 1851-1862; 
Nouveaux lundis, 13 vols., 1863-1869; Premiers lundis, 3 vols., pub- 
lished posthumously. 

Criticism: D'Haussonville, Sainte-Beuve, sa vie et ses oeuvres; 
Levallois, Sainte-Beuve; Brunetiere, Evolution des genres, i. 217, and 
Poesie lyrique, i. 217 ; Taine, Nouveaux essais, p. 51 ; G. M. Harper, 
Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve. 



THE EVOLUTION OF HISTORY AND CRITICISM. 275 

the author apologized next year in a volume of " Con- 
solations." One more volume of verse, " Les Pens^es 
d'Aout " (1837), completes his wooing of a refractory 
muse. He had not poetic imagination. Though he 
anticipated at times the popular note of Copp^e and 
Manuel, there is something decidedly prosaic, common- 
place, in the sentiments that he solemnly confesses at 
the first, and toys with to the last. Even in his 
poetry he is a critic of his own sensations, but these 
are not curious or rare enough to deserve such anal- 
ysis. Still, if the " Poesies " and the " Pensdes " were 
perhaps not worth printing, they were worth writing, 
for they contributed to make him one of the keenest 
analysts of moral nature, whether in men or in books. 
And doubtless they contributed essentially to the 
work he was afterward to accomplish for the enrich- 
ment of the French poetic vocabulary and the supple 
variety of its rhymes. He justified critically what 
Hugo had felt instinctively. The truest illustrations 
of his principles are not to be found in his own poems, 
but in the " Funambulesques " of Banville and the 
"Fleurs du mal" of Baudelaire. 

In prose fiction Sainte-Beuve made but one essay, 
" Volupt^ " (1824). To him this form of expression 
proved as unsatisfactory and more laborious than verse 
itself. He heeded the admonition of his double failure, 
and devoted himself to pure criticism in lectures and 
literary reviews, while slowly elaborating his "History 
of Port Eoyal," a work for which his post as a Conser- 
vator of the Mazarin Library gave him both leisure and 
opportunity, till the Eevolution of 1848 deprived him of 
this sinecure, and so led him to a brief professorship at 
the Belgian university of Likge which he made illus- 
trious by his lectures on Chateaubriand, the first ripe 



276 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

product of his genius. But in 1849 he returned to Paris 
and began the famous " Causeries du lundi," weekly 
critical articles in a conversational tone, that extended 
with some intermissions almost to his death, and give 
him his chief title to the grateful remembrance of all 
students of French literature. Though he was nomi- 
nated a senator in 1865, he took but little interest in 
the politics of his time except in so far as they affected 
free thought. But this complete devotion to his pro- 
fession in years of oppression and ferment earned him 
the dislike of the student body, and they drove him 
from his lectureship at the Ecole Normale (1854). 
Gradually, however, his sturdy independence regained 
the esteem of that mobile body ; and his funeral, on 
the eve of the Napoleonic collapse, became a popular 
liberal demonstration. 

Sainte-Beuve has described his " Critiques et por- 
traits," essays written before 1848, by the words "Youth 
painted youth." He felt that he had been too superla- 
tively generous in his appreciation, especially of Hugo 
and his fellow Eomanticists. Still, this earlier work 
had shown a constant progress in estimating contem- 
poraries, 1 though some have thought that jealousy 
warped his judgments of the greatest writers of his own 
time, and it is certainly in his criticism of former gener- 
ations that he is most sober and suggestive. But the 
great critic in him dates from 1849 and the " Causeries." 

His popularity, his influence, and so his importance 
depended much on the novelty of his method. For the 

1 Matthew Arnold suggests the comparison of his undiscriminating 
praise of Hugo in 1831 with the keen dissection of 1835, where Hugo 
has become : " The Frank, energetic and subtle, who has mastered to 
perfection the technical and rhetorical resources of the Latin literature 
of the decadence." 



THE EVOLUTION OF HISTORY AND CRITICISM. 277 

dry-as-dust, mineral-cabinet process of Nisard, he sub- 
stituted the "literary chat/' the causerie critique, in 
which he might gather all the facts and anecdotes, 
however trivial, that would throw light on the author 
and his environment, and so explain the work that had 
grown from one as well as the other. Then, too, he 
looked always rather at merits than failures, at what a 
man was than at what he was not. A subjective critic 
naturally praises what pleases him. He is naturally 
tolerant of rising talent and of eccentric natures. He 
welcomes novelty just as the objective critic dreads it. 
The unclassified attracts the one ; it repels the other. 
" What I sought in criticism," said Sainte-Beuve, " was 
to put in it a sort of charm, and at the same time more 
reality." He succeeded in both endeavors. He made 
criticism the most popular of the serious forms of liter- 
ature, and he rescued it from its old intolerant artifi- 
ciality forever. 

Sainte-Beuve called himself a disciple of Bacon, by 
which he may have meant that books seemed to him 
inseparable from the men that wrote them, and equally 
dependent on moral and psychological conditions. 
Hence arose for him the necessity of a scientific study 
of character. He would aspire to do for man what 
Jussieu had done for plants and Cuvier for animals. 
Nothing human can be foreign to this collector of tal- 
ents. He passes with easy flight from the gay to the 
demure, from the philosopher to the jester. Every- 
where he finds the best and makes it his own. " He is 
the very personification of criticism considered as a 
science of sagacious analysis and at the same time as 
the most delicate of the arts." 1 

1 Pellissier, Mouvement litteraire, p. 131, to whom I am indebted 
for other suggestions in this and the preceding paragraph. 



278 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

Sainte-Beuve more than once calls his work " natural 
history," and himself " a naturalist of the mind." The 
use of these words may be fortuitous ; but such terms, 
with " physiology," " surgery," and the like, mark the 
feeling that criticism had in it the possibilities of an 
exact science. Indeed he hoped that there would 
eventually be found in it something of the luminous 
life and order that presides over the distribution of 
botanical and zoological families. But to this critical 
science, of which he had a prophetic vision, he never 
himself attained, nor indeed seriously attempted it. 
He remained to the last essentially subjective. " Almost 
all a critic needs," he thinks, " is to know how to read 
a book, judging it as he reads, and never ceasing to en- 
joy," making his criticism, as he says in another place, 
"an emanation of books." But his idea of a science of 
criticism was soon to be developed with brilliant genius 
and rigid logic by Hippolyte Adolphe Taine. 

Taine, 1 the theorist of Naturalism, was born just as 
the Eomantic School was winning its first victories. 
Like his great contemporary Eenan, he lost his father 
in early youth, and owed to the quiet home training of 

1 Born 1828 ; died 1892. His principal volumes are : Essai sur La 
Fontaine, 1853 (revised 1860) ; Essai sur Tite-Live, 1854 ; Philosophes 
francais du xix. siecle, 1856; Essais de critique et d'histoire, 1857; 
Histoire de la litterature anglaise, 1864; Nouveaux essais, 1865; Phi- 
losophic d'art en Italie, 1866; Notes sur Paris (Thomas Graindorge), 
1867; LTdeal dans Tart, 1867; Philosophie d'art dans les Pays-Bas, 
1868; De Intelligence, 1870; Notes sur TAngleterre, 1872; Origines 
de la France contemporaine (Ancien regime, 1876, ReVolution, 1878- 
1884, Regime moderne, 1890, unfinished). 

Critical essays on Taine may be found in Bourget, Essais de psy- 
chologie contemporaine, 175 ; Lemaitre, Les Contemporains, iv. 169; 
Contemporary Review, April, 1893 (Gabriel Monod). Lanson, Littera- 
ture francaise, p. 1019, and Pellissier, Mouvement litteraire, p. 307, are 
both helpful though summary judgments. 



THE EVOLUTION OF HISTORY AND CRITICISM. 279 

his mother a devotion to study and truth for its own 
sake that never deserted him through life. He had 
intended to fit himself for a professorship, but even as 
a student at the Ecole Normale he showed himself a 
thinker so independent and restive under its philosophic 
eclecticism that his examiners, regarding such talent as 
dangerous, tried to stifle it by a provincial appointment, 
which he promptly resigned. He seized the unfore- 
seen leisure to supplement his philosophy by studies 
in medicine and natural science, and thus brought him- 
self more in touch with the spirit of the rising genera- 
tion. Hence it was that his early essays on La Fontaine, 
Livy, and the French Philosophers won immediate pop- 
ularity, while his little account of a " Journey through 
the Pyrenees'' (1855) showed his mastery of ordered 
and minute observation. It marked a scientific mind, 
and won him at the same time recognition in the re- 
public of letters. 

In 1864 the government that had thought him dan- 
gerous ten years before, made him professor in the 
Ecole des Beaux Arts, a position to which we owe 
several series of lectures on the history of art that are 
models of philosophic criticism. In the same year he 
published his monumental " History of English Litera- 
ture," applying the same principles in another field. 
But from his studies of literature and art he was 
diverted, by the collapse of the Empire and the disasters 
of his country in the " Terrible Year," to the philoso- 
phy of history ; for he thought he saw in the sins and 
shortcomings of the old regime, in the Jacobins and 
in Bonaparte, the sufficient cause of all the woes of 
his native land. To show this in detail was the aim 
of the rest of his life and of the " Sources of Contem- 
porary France," a work of immense erudition, bris- 



280 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

tling with quotations, yet so systematized as to be 
almost mechanical in the logic of its development. 
He condemned the ancien regime as the true ancestor 
of Jacobinism, for the monarchy had so fostered its 
own supplanter and executioner that " one may regard 
its history as a long suicide." But he found the worst 
faults of the royalists repeated by the republicans, and 
reserved the bitterest vial of his wrath for the Corsican 
condottiere Bonaparte. Thus he alienated, by turns, 
the monarchists, the republicans, and the imperial- 
ists, while remaining through all the twenty years of 
this arduous study entirely consistent with the prin- 
ciples that had guided his whole scholarly life in 
history, philosophy, aesthetics, and literature ; alike 
unmoved by popular clamor and indifferent to popular 
success. 

These principles that underlie his whole work have 
exercised more influence on literature than his direct 
teaching has done. It is to those therefore, rather 
than to this, that one should first direct attention, for 
they are the philosophical basis of the pessimistic 
poetry and Naturalistic fiction that form so large a 
part of the literature of this half-century. 1 

If one attempts to realize the intellectual condition 
of France when Taine was graduated from the Ecole 
Normale in 1853, its chief characteristic will appear 
to be a profound disillusionment. The Romantic move- 
ment was bankrupt, Ponsard's pseudo-classicism seemed 
a forlorn hope, Musset was drinking himself to death, 
De Vigny had withdrawn from letters into what Sainte- 
Beuve called his "tower of ivory," Lamartine and 

1 In what follows I have been guided in the main by the arrange- 
ment of Pellissier, though I am indebted in some measure to all the 
authors cited in the preceding note. 



THE EVOLUTION OF HISTORY AND CRITICISM. 281 

Gautier had turned perforce to prose, Hugo was in 
exile. The first dramatic successes of Dumas fils and 
Labiche were swallows that announced but did not 
make the Naturalistic summer, 1 and the novel was 
to remain for some years still where Balzac had left 
it on his death in 1850. In politics, too, reaction 
weighed on France. The coup d'etat of 1851 had 
muzzled the press and the tribune, and would have 
been quite ready to muzzle the pulpit also, had it 
shown any quiver of independent life. Under these 
conditions the thought of France looked for its eman- 
cipation to the scientific spirit that made itself felt 
almost simultaneously in all branches of intellectual 
activity, in the high art of Meissonier and the low art 
of Forain, in the dramas of Dumas and Augier,* in the 
poetry of the Parnassians, in the historical investiga- 
tions of the philologist Eenan, and presently in the 
novels of Flaubert and the Goncourt brothers. All 
these were equally penetrated with the analytic, meticu- 
lous spirit that found its chief nourishment in " sug- 
gestive little facts," that regarded the eclecticism of 
Cousin as outworn and the positivism of Comte as 
unreasonably positive, while they found their clearest 
and most uncompromising exponent in the author of 
the Essay on La Fontaine, the young graduate of the 
Ecole Normale. 

Science and poetry were not the same thing to 
them, but they felt that in the depths of the mind 
they would be found to have the same roots, that there 
was something common between them. 2 Hence they 

1 Labiche, Le Chapeau de paille d'ltalie, 1851 ; Dumas fils, La 
Dame aux camelias, 1852. 

2 This is essentially the thought of Brunetiere, Poesie lyrique, 
ii. 178. 



282 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

conceived it to be one of the functions of art, if not its 
pre-eminent function and proper end, to manifest by its 
own peculiar means this primitive relation and these 
secret affinities. Herein lies the raison d'etre of 
literary Naturalism, of which the fruitful truth will 
survive the vagaries of the doctrinaire novelists and 
critics, who had, perhaps, least share of its spirit or 
comprehension of its nature. 

No generation ever took more hopefully to heart 
that lofty promise, " The truth shall make you free ; " 
but by "truth" they meant a minute study of phe- 
nomena. " The whole world," says Bourget, " seemed 
to Taine material for intellectual exploitation," or, as 
he puts it himself, "little facts, well chosen, impor- 
tant, significant, amply substantiated, minutely noted, 
such is, to-day. the material of every science/' — of psy- 
chology, in his view, quite as much as of chemistry. 
Hence his persistent attempt to make of psychology 
an exact science by introducing a determining element 
from physiology ; hence, too, the ancillary disciplines 
of aesthetics and literary criticism are treated by him 
as exact sciences, capable of rigorous analysis and sys- 
tematic deduction. Where Sainte-Beuve had sought 
to show how environment had influenced literature, 
Taine undertook to prove that it had caused it. His 
dogmatic assurance needed only to be reinforced by his 
vast reading, as in the "History of English Literature," 
to find its response in the educated thought of the 
younger generation in imperial France ; and he pres- 
ently found in the novelists a most zealous body of 
unsought allies in his psychological researches into 
what Zola has called "human documents." It is to 
his teaching, in the opinion of Bourget, that the minute 
observation of the modern artist is largely due. It is 



THE EVOLUTION OF HISTORY AND CRITICISM. 283 

to his impulse that we owe the multitude of " little 
note-books," the daily resort of Daudet and Zola in 
their effort to realize Taine's expectation that "the 
great dramatists and romancers should do for the 
presents what historians do for the past." 

But his system explains more in their work than 
the method of its composition. Any psychologist who 
depends on observation will almost of necessity seek 
the abnormal, the extreme manifestations of mind and 
character, for these are to him what the microscope is 
to the botanist; they show the laws of thought mag- 
nified, distorted perhaps, but more useful to his pur- 
pose ; and so the typical naturalistic and psychological 
novelists are only following Taine when they deal by 
preference with the monstrosities or the exceptions, 
with moral or nervous disease, with the Germinie Lacer- 
taux, the Lantiers, Claude and Etienne, the Larchers, 
and the Sidonies of society, 1 to whom their art can 
give a high relief without the infinite labor that 
Flaubert required to make an equal impression with 
his Monsieur Homais or his Charles Bovary. 2 

Still another result of this new experimental psy- 
chology is a shifting of moral standards. To a deter- 
minist like Taine, "there are causes for ambition, 
courage, veracity, as for digestion, muscular movement, 
and animal heat. Vice and virtue are products like 
vitriol and sugar;" and beneath the most cultured 
representative of Parisian society, if we unwrap his 
nature from the mummy-cloths of social and inherited 
restraint, we shall find everywhere and always a the 

1 Characters in E. and J. de Goncourt, Germinie Lacertaux ; Zola, 
L'CEnvre, and L'Assommoir ; Bourget, Mensonges and Psychologie de 
Tarn our moderne ; Daudet, Fromont jeune et Risler aine. 

2 Both characters in Flaubert, Madame Bovary. 



284 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

ferocious and lustful gorilla." But life and history 
when looked at from this determinist position tend 
inevitably to pessimistic submission to nature, and 
pessimistic Taine was to the core. Health, even rea- 
son itself, seems to him only "a happy accident," and 
he concludes that " the best fruit of science is cold 
resignation, for it pacifies and prepares the soul, so 
that our suffering is reduced to bodily pain." Most 
striking, too, is a passage on the Florentine Niobe, 
whom the sculptor has presented as her sons are fall- 
ing beneath the celestial arrows of Apollo. " Cold and 
still she stands ; hopeless, with eyes fixed on heaven, 
she contemplates with awe-struck horror the dazzling 
and deadly nimbus, the extended arms, the inevitable 
shafts, and the implacable serenity of the god." This 
is the mind that will exclaim as it looks down the 
vistas of time, " What a cemetery is history ! " 

Now let him apply these doctrines to literature and 
art. These, as he says in his "Philosophy of Art," 
manifest natural causes and fundamental laws in con- 
crete terms of sense, addressing themselves not merely 
to reason, as science does by its deduction of exact 
formulae and abstract terms, but to the hearts and 
senses of men. Thus they are at once more lofty 
and more popular ; for they manifest what is highest, 
and manifest it to all. So ail literary phenomena 
must be products, inevitable products ; and their factors 
are race, historical and physical environment and mo- 
mentum, or the tendency to perpetuation and evolu- 
tion in already existing conditions. The whole of the 
elaborate "History of English Literature," from the 
harpers of "Beowulf" to the last "idle singer of an 
empty day," is intended as an illustration and proof 
of this theory. By it, too, he seeks to explain La 



THE EVOLUTION OF HISTORY AND CRITICISM. 285 

Fontaine and Eacine, eliminating, surely beyond what 
present psychological accuracy of analysis will justify, 
that play of individual genius which has been called 
by Lanson " the inexplicable residuum." To Taine 
the poem is as much a product as the honeycomb, 
and he treats it like a naturalist. To use a happy 
figure of Pellissier (p. 307), he does not urge us to 
follow the example of the bee, or even to admire its 
skill; but he catches one, examines it, dissects it, 
scrutinizes the internal arrangement of the organs so 
as to fix its class, and then investigates by what 
method it gathers, elaborates, and changes pollen into 
honey. And so he and his school come to attach the 
greatest importance to form and to those laws of 
aesthetics that foster a purely impersonal objectivity. 
For, indeed, it is clear that Naturalism in literature 
is the logical and inevitable concomitant of the deter- 
minist philosophy, as Taine's study of Balzac seems to 
have convinced even Sainte-Beuve. 

His method will be the same with the art of Greece 
and the Italian Eenaissance as with the genre painters 
of the Dutch School. But here, as in literature, while 
he accounts admirably for the general characteristics 
of a nation or a period, he does not lay sufficient weight 
on the individuality of genius, — on what separates 
a Eacine from a Pradon, a Eembrandt from a Breughl. 
And just as in psychology he was attracted by the 
exceptional and the extreme, because they promised 
a richer harvest of " significant little facts," so in 
literature and in art he is attracted by artists and 
authors who push one quality to its extreme rather 
than by those who show a rounded perfection. It is 
not with him a question of the good, or even primarily 
of the beautiful, in statue or poem ; a wasp is as 



286 MODEKN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

interesting to the naturalist as the busiest of bees. To 
Taine the value of a work of art or of literature is in 
what it teaches, in the number of " essential, signifi- 
cant little facts " in regard to its object that it repro- 
duces or reveals. This will be his primary classification. 
Secondarily, he will rank works of art or literature, 
according to their beneficence ; that is, according to the 
result for mental health and pleasure on the specta- 
tor or reader. He puts last and in a wholly subordi- 
nate place what Gautier would have put first, — art for 
art's sake, the skill of the author in doing what he 
tries to do. 

Taine's style is like the man and like his philosophy, 
grave, sincere, simple, and with rare exceptions serene. 
There is hardly a trace of irony, of straining for effect, 
or of deep enthusiasm, and there seems none at all of 
sentimentality or of mysticism. The man's character, 
and his work also, was essentially logical, almost 
mechanical, and in its finer moments architectural in 
its methodical upbuilding from phrase through para- 
graph and chapter to a unified structure in which each 
single stone has its designated place and function. 
He eschews the ornaments and freedom of a discur- 
sive style, allows himself few and brief digressions, 
relegating to the unessential what does not fit on the 
procrustean bed of his system. Add to this that his 
philosophy led him to deal almost wholly with the 
realities of sense, " the little facts," the grouping of 
which in ordered masses was one of the greatest tri- 
umphs of his genius. As one reads, one is drawn into 
a state of mind where each petty event seems the de- 
termining cause of others, where each group is linked 
to others, where each is effect and each is cause, while 
all contribute to the sign or idea that forms a part of 



THE EVOLUTION OF HISTORY AND CRITICISM. 287 

personality ; where thought and the ego itself become 
but forms of molecular motion, induced by repeated 
sensations. 

To the demonstration of such a philosophy this style 
i$ admirably adapted. All in it is development, all is 
swayed by determinism. There is nothing to startle, 
no sudden turns, no unexpected mental or moral shock ; 
for though he will seek the solution of everything he 
will pass a moral judgment on nothing. Indeed he 
will guard himself as far as may be from " proscrib- 
ing " or " pardoning " at all, although he thus eludes 
the end and purpose of true criticism, the definition 
of relative beauty by classification. 

His is not the temper nor the style of a prophet, 
nor of a preacher, but of an expounder, a demonstrator, 
bent only on giving to each scene its true color and 
perspective, on placing each event or statue or book 
or picture in its exact relations of race, environment, 
and continuity of development. Oratorical he is, but 
it is the oratory of the bar, not of the pulpit ; or, 
as Mr. Monod puts it, "his imagination is but the 
sumptuous raiment of his dialectic." 

The fault of Taine's system, as has been already 
suggested, is that it rigidly and intentionally ex- 
cludes a certain psychic element, "the inexpressible 
monad " of individuality, that many of his readers feel 
to be as real as any of his " little facts." So in literary 
criticism, which more immediately concerns us, while 
he begins with Sainte-Beuve he is apt to end with 
Nisard. He will seek, just as Sainte-Beuve would 
have done, the explanation of literary phenomena in 
environment, but he will order the facts so won after 
a preconceived system, where Sainte-Beuve would have 
judged them independently. 



288 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

It was this logic, at once relentless and inadequate, 
that repelled the delicately tuned soul of Amiel. The 
reading of Taine, he said, " dried, corroded, saddened 
him." It had to him " the smell of the laboratory ; " 
it never inspired, but only informed, and gave " algebra 
to those who asked life, the formula for the image, 
the heady fumes of distillation for the divine intoxica- 
tion of Apollo." And yet this very rigidity has had 
a charm to many minds in all times, but especially in 
times like his, when the world-spirit, the Zeitgeist, re- 
turns to rest on solid ground after excursions in the 
realms of romantic imagination. Such alternations 
recur at shortening intervals in every nation's mental 
life. Taine was at the turn of the Naturalistic tide. It 
was the opportuneness of his system more than its depth 
that made him the guiding light to the intellectually 
productive men of France almost until his death. But 
the last decade of the century was not far advanced 
before signs multiplied of restlessness at the narrow and 
sober horizon of naturalism and determinism and French 
critics and writers were showing a disposition to follow 
rather the disciples of the studiously unsystematic 
skepticism of Eenan. 

A greater contrast in birth, training, disposition, en- 
vironment, and moral or literary influence can hardly 
be imagined than that which separates Hippolyte 
Taine from Ernest Eenan, who in these latter days 
seems to have been more and more the chosen leader 
of French thought, or at least of its literary and criti- 
cal expression, though perhaps it is inaccurate to apply 
the name " leader " to such a guide. 

He was born 1 in the once monastic and modern 

1 Born 1823 ; died 1892. Averroes et Averro'isme, 1852. Collected 
essays: Etudes d'histoire religieuse, 1857; Essais de morale et de 



THE EVOLUTION OF HISTORY AND CRITICISM. 289 

fishing-village of Trdguier in Brittany, of Celtic stock 
that it has pleased some to connect with Saint Ronan 
of greater Britain. He lost his father in early youth, 
and owed it to the devotion of his sister that he was 
enabled to begin at the school of the local priests the 
studies for which his delicate health seemed to desig- 
nate him. His brilliant progress made him a marked 
boy. He was invited by Dupanloup, the future arch- 
bishop, to his seminary in Paris, whence he was ad- 
vanced to Saint-Sulpice, the chief training-school of 
the French priesthood, for which his masters reported 
"he was trying to have a vocation." But here his 
critical studies of the Scripture texts and works of 
German philosophy, surreptitiously furnished by his 
sister, gradually weakened his intellectual hold on the 
Catholic faith, though not his love for its beauty nor 
his warm regard for its worthy professors. At twenty- 
two he determined to abandon his study for orders, 
and his old patron Dupanloup magnanimously pro- 
cured for him a Latin mastership in a clerical school. 

critique, 1859; Questions contemporaines, 1868; Melanges d'histoire 
et cle voyages, 1878 ; Nouvelles etudes, 1884; Discours et conferences, 
1887 ; L'Avenir de la science, 1890 (written in 1848). Church history : 
Vie de Jesus, 1863; Saint Paul et sa mission, 1867; L' Ante-Christ, 
1873; Les Evangelistes, 1877; L'Eglise chretienne, 1879; Marc- 
Aurele, 1881, to which was added a Table generate, 1883, and later 
the introductory study : Histoire du Peuple Israel, 1888-1894 (5 vols). 
Dramas : Caliban, I/Eau de Jouvence, Le Pretre de Nemi, Dialogue 
des morts, I/Abbesse de Jouarre, Le Jour de l'an, first collected as 
" Drames philosophiques " in 1888. 

Criticism: Pellissier, 1. c. p. 314; Lanson, 1. c. p. 1069; Bourget, 
Essais de psychologic contemporaine, p. 35 ; Seailles, Ernest Renan. 
Nineteenth Century, June and July, 1881 (Myers) ; Contemporary 
Review, August, 1883 (Davies) ; Westminster Review, October, 1891 
(Gleadell) ; Fortnightly Review, November, 1892; Contemporary 
Review, November, 1892 (Monod) ; Revue bleue, October, 1893 
(Darmesteter). See also Lemaitre, Contemporains, i. 193, iv. 245; 
Prance, La Vie litteraire, i. 422, ii. 317. 

19 



290 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

We know of these early years chiefly from his 
charming " Souvenirs " (1890) and their sequel, "Les 
Feuilles d^tachdes " (1892). He was relieved by his 
sister's savings from pressing want, and his scholar- 
ship soon gave him an assured position. He was but 
twenty-five when he won his doctorate with high dis- 
tinction ; and already the Academy of Inscriptions had 
awarded him a prize for his " General History and 
Comparative Systems of the Semitic Languages." An- 
other prize for an essay on the " Study of Greek in 
the Middle Ages" followed, in 1850. He was sent by 
the Academy to Italy, and published as the fruit of 
his studies there an epoch-making work on Arab phi- 
losophy. Again, in 1860, he was sent to Syria on an 
archaeological mission, whence he returned "with the 
conception of his " Life of Christ" (1863). Soon after 
he was elected to the chair of Hebrew in the College 
de France ; but though this institution, by its founda- 
tion and its traditions, is independent of dogmatic 
influences, some expressions savoring of Unitarianism in 
his inaugural address, supplemented by the sensation 
caused by the " Vie de Jfeus," excluded him from pro- 
fessorial functions during the Second Empire, a loss 
that was much more than counterbalanced by the 
wide circulation that the resulting popularity gave to 
his ideas. He had already printed noteworthy articles 
in the scholarly reviews, full of the enthusiastic con- 
viction that politics, education, and ethics itself would 
be regenerated by the progress of science, and more 
especially by that of his own favorites, history and 
philology ; but it was from the time of his suspended 
professorship and the " Life of Christ " that he began 
to exercise an influence beyond the circle of the 
learned. Of the " Vie de Jdsus," whose captivating 



THE EVOLUTION OF HISTORY AND CRITICISM. 291 

beauty disguised a most powerful ethical solvent, more 
than 300,000 copies have been sold in France alone, 
and for every work that has followed there has been 
a popular as well as a professional demand, though it 
does not appear that Eenan ever sacrificed anything 
that he held essential to a desire for fame. 

The "Life of Jesus " was only the first of seven vol- 
umes dealing with the origins of Christianity during 
the period extending from the birth of Christ to the 
death of Marcus Aurelius, to which he afterward 
added an introductory " History of the Jews," his last 
important work. But this vast task by no means ab- 
sorbed his philosophic interest. Besides important 
contributions to the huge " Literary History of France," 
begun by*the Benedictines of a former century, he wrote 
a considerable number of Oriental studies and trans- 
lations, and several curious " Philosophic Dramas " 
that contain the most daring of his speculations. The 
dispassionate calm of his mind was well illustrated at 
the time of the German war in two letters to David 
Strauss, the radical Biblical critic of Tubingen. In 
the first, he magnanimously recognizes his debt to 
German culture at a moment when France was feeling 
the weight of her conquering arms ; in the second 
he vindicates for the conquered the superiority of 
French esprit. And later, also, his speech at his 
reception to the Academy (1879), and the "Letter to 
a Friend in Germany" that the discussion over it 
evoked, were remarkably free from any taint of chau- 
vinism. During his last years he enjoyed all the 
honors, public and private, that Paris could bestow on 
her favorite scholar. He was made Grand Officer of 
the Legion of Honor and Administrator of the College 
de France, where he died, as he had wished, at his 



292 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

post, October 2, 1892. This characteristic saying is 
recorded among his last words : " Let us submit to 
those natural laws of which we are one of the mani- 
festations. Heaven and earth remain," — a sentiment 
that accords curiously with that recorded of the aged 
Goethe. 1 

Into the religious and philological controversies that 
raged around Kenan's writings, and especially around 
his " Christian Origins," controversies whose volume is 
rivalled only by their acrimony, it is happily not our 
task to enter ; but it is necessary to define, so far as it 
does not elude definition, what Eenanism is, and what 
its effect has been on recent French literature. 

Both Eenan and Taine were determinists, and both 
were full of the scientific spirit. But what in the lat- 
ter bred a mathematical dogmatism inspired in the other 
a cautious, indefinite, mystical, idealistic, ironical skep- 
ticism, with which there was a curious intermingling 
of romantic sentiment that fostered a joyous optimism, 
in strange contrast to Taine's gloom. 2 

Eenan was, or at least took pains to seem, a smiling 
philosopher. He saw so many sides of truth, so many 
of its" antinomies, that he was never quite sure of any 
definition, but he was sure of his own wit and genius, 
and was " the first to delight in Eenanism." 3 " The 
world," he said, borrowing a simile from Heinrich 
Heine, "is a spectacle that God gives himself. Let us 
serve the aim of the grand stage-manager by contriving 
to make the spectacle as brilliant and varied as possi- 
ble." In the same spirit he speaks of life as " a charm- 

1 Eckermann's Conversations, part iii., Oct. 8, 1827. 

2 Challemel Lacour said of him : " He thinks like a man, feels like 
a woman, and acts like a child," an epigram cited by nearly every 
writer on Kenan. Si non e vero e ben trovato. 

3 Lemaitre, Contemporains, i. 211. 



THE EVOLUTION OF HISTORY AND CRITICISM. 293 

ing promenade," and thinks the nineteenth century 
" the most amusing of ages " to one who like him re- 
gards it " with benevolent and universal irony." His 
joy is the intellectual delight of a favored critic who 
cares less for the play itself than for the scope that it 
gives to the display of his own genius. " One should 
write," said he, " only of what one loves," and in writ- 
ing of religion he satisfied at once his critical and his 
mystical nature. 

This combination leads to a dilettante spirit, the spirit 
that asks, " What is truth ? and will not stay for an 
answer." Here all lofty conception of moral duty 
yields to the enjoyment of a beauty that seems its own 
excuse for being, while the true end of man becomes 
" to rise above the vulgarities in which common exist- 
ence grovels." He has put this dilettante attitude very 
happily when he says, " God prefers the blasphemy of 
great minds to the selfish prayer of the vulgar; for 
though the blasphemy may imply an incomplete view 
of things, it contains an element of just protest, while 
egoism contains no particle of truth." And if one asks 
why God should be pleased with a protest against the 
order of his world, Eenan will answer, as he did to the 
mourning Breton mother, that " God would like to pre- 
vent such things, but is not able yet." 

Still, it might be hasty to call Eenan frivolous or a 
Pyrrhonist. He could say proudly to the temptations 
of the Imperial Minister of Education, " Thy money 
perish w T ith thee," and he asked that his epitaph might 
be Veritatem dilexi, " I have loved truth." He was in 
earnest when he said that he thought he was the only 
man of his time who had been able to comprehend 
Francis of Assisi, and avowed his belief that " religion 
is a product of the normal man, so that he who is most 



294 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

religious and most assured of an infinite destiny is most 
true to his nature/' 2 Again, in his " Souvenirs/' he 
says : " I feel that my life is always governed by a faith 
I no longer possess. ... It still lives by habit and sen- 
timent. One continues to do mechanically what one 
once did in spirit and truth." And in this sense he 
declares that " few persons have a right not to believe 
in Christianity." So he counselled doubting priests to 
remain in the church, desired that children be brought 
up in it, and deplored the passing away of popular faith 
in France. He ordered his outward life according to 
Christian standards, and found serenity and consolation 
in the conviction that he was giving " electric shocks 
to people who would rather go to sleep," and laying the 
foundations of a Christianity purer than his contempo- 
raries knew. 2 

The contradictions that puzzle many of his readers 
were entirely obvious to their author. He regarded 
himself as by nature " a tissue of contradictions . . . 
one half fated to be employed in destroying the 
other." "I do not complain," he adds, " for this moral 
constitution has procured me the keenest intellectual 
pleasure that man can enjoy." And again he says : 
" I am by nature double, one part of me laughs 
while the other weeps. ... So there is always one 
part happy." Such citations could be multiplied 
indefinitely, for he was at no pains to avoid this 
paradoxical assertion of the uncertainty of meta- 
physical and ethical speculation, and felt humili- 
ated that it should take him five or six years of 
the study of Semitic languages and German criti- 

1 I/Avenir religieux. 

2 See the prefaces to " Etudes d'histoire religieuse " and to "Essais 
de morale et de critique. " 



THE EVOLUTION OF HISTORY AND CRITICISM. 295 

cism " to reach exactly the conclusion of the street 
gamin Gavroche." 1 

The key to these contradictions is the union in 
Eenan of two races, the Breton and the Norman, and 
of two trainings, the ecclesiastical " and the scientific, 
neither of which overcomes the other, while each by 
turns possesses his mind. Science is not moral, virtue 
is not scientific ; but morality and virtue, the spirit of 
unselfishness and sacrifice, are a part of his idealism, 
another aspect of truth which he feels as essential 
to right living as any knowledge of phenomena with 
which to smaller minds it might seem in contradiction. 
No religion, according to him, has any basis in science. 
Intellectually Eenan knows of "no free will superior 
to man's that acts in any cognizable manner," but yet 
he accepts all religions as good within their limits of 
idealism. Only the compromisers are an offence to 
him. He feels nearer to the Ultramontanes than to 
the Neo-Catholics. The result of this attitude is to draw 
a sharp line between the domains of science and 
faith. There can be no antagonism where there is no 
contact. Hence he has done the church of his youth 
a great service, among those who have comprehended 
him, by illustrating how a man may possess a faith 
that does not possess him, 2 and by opposing the un- 
philosophic attitude toward the church of Voltaire's 
" Ecrasez l'infame," that still sways the democratic 
masses of France. Here his influence has been most 
definite and most happy, for it has been a voice for 
religious peace and toleration. 

Such views of philosophy and religion imply pride 
of intellect and a sense of superiority to his fellows, — • 

1 For passages of similar tenor, see Bourget's essay, p. 62 sqq. 

2 The antithesis belongs to Anatole France. 



296 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

in other words, an aristocratic temperament. He does 
not think the mass of mankind fit to enjoy his pleasures 
or hold his creed. He dreads democracy in society and 
politics. 1 " All civilization is the work of aristocrats/' 
says the Prior in "Caliban," and in the same play 
Prospero thinks labor should be the serf of thought, 
though " democrats find the doctrine monstrous." 
" Noli me tangere is all we can ask of democracy," he 
says elsewhere ; and he shudders at the Americanizing 
of society, to countervail which he dreams of an intel- 
lectual oligarchy who shall so hold in their sole control 
the still unguessed forces of science that they " will 
reign by absolute terror, because they will have the 
existence of all in their hands." This aristocratic 
spirit appears also in the contemptuous irony of his 
suggestion that Flaubert's Homais, the typical pro- 
vincial philistine, may after all be the best theologian ; 
and it is this that gives its sting to his dissection of 
B^ranger's convivial prayer, where glass in hand the 
poet begs his lady-love to 

Lever les yeux vers ce monde invisible, 
Oil pour toujours nous nous reunissons, 

as a melancholy proof of the " incurable religious 
mediocrity " of Prance. 2 

But whether Eenan is a dilettante, a mystic, or an 
aristocrat, he is always a fascinating writer to the 
thoughtful. His style is like his mind, subtle, sinuous, 
apparently clear, and yet escaping the ultimate analysis 
and eluding the appreciation of ordinary readers, who 
miss such ornaments of diction as arrest their attention 

1 See " Caliban," " Eau de Jouvence," and " Eeforme intellectuelle 
et morale," this last written in view of the disasters of 1871. 

2 Questions contemporaines, p. 467. 



THE EVOLUTION OF HISTORY AND CRITICISM. 297 

in Hugo and Michelet. The greater number admire him 
for his skill in saving sentiment to their lack of faith, 
but choice spirits discern in him one of the greatest 
and most varied masters of French in his century. A 
distinguished critic, Mr. Saintsbury, has called his style 
"a direct descendant of that of Eousseau through 
Chateaubriand/' but its charm seems rather to lie in a 
peculiar vague suggestiveness and spirituality. Even 
from a purely formal side it shows less affinity with 
these writers than with the Hebrew Scriptures and the 
Latin and Greek classics, while in its vocabulary, ex- 
cept perhaps in the latest pieces, it is severely simple 
and restrained. But he manipulates these limited re- 
sources with such skill that rhythm, metaphor, and 
direct description always seem to contain more than 
meets the ear, their outlines dissolving, as some critic 
has delicately said, like those of Corot's landscapes, 
in which what we see is but the smaller part of what 
we discern. Bourget cites a passage from Kenan's es- 
say on Celtic poetry that is at once an example and a 
description : — 

Jamais on n'a savoure assez longuement ces voluptes de 
la conscience, ces reminiscences poetiques, ou se croisent 
a la fois toutes les sensations de la vie, si vagues, si 
profondes, si peuetrantes, que, pour peu qu'elles vinssent a 
se prolonger, on en mourrait, sans qu'on put dire si c'est 
d'amertume ou de douceur. 

Such phrases as " voluptes de la conscience " and their 
delicate definition as " reminiscences at once vague and 
deep and searching and overpowering, and yet neither 
sweet nor bitter/' should show how far Eenan is from 
being a direct descendant of Eousseau. 

Kenan's influence was for years the strongest single 



298 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

element in French literature. "In him more than in 
any of his contemporaries," says Mr. Monod, "breathed 
the soul of modern France." To him is directly due 
the reawakening of religious curiosity, which leads to 
such analyses as Daudet's " L'Evangeliste " and " La 
Petite paroisse," as Bourget's "Nouveaux pastels," and 
Huysmans' " En route." But this owes less to any 
teaching of his than to the example of his dilettantism, 
which in his imitators becomes a skeptical power of 
varied enjoyment of the results of a previous, positive, 
creative period. Doubtless Benan is not the originator 
of this "state of soul" which is the natural result of 
the overwhelming complexity of Parisian civilization, 
but his peculiar training made him its ablest and 
frankest exponent, and so he became leader and prophet 
to many in that perplexed fin de siecle, which shrank 
with the dread of old experience from what one of 
its ablest essayists called "the horrible mania of cer- 
tainty." And the French criticism of to-day still 
seems " weary of all except of understanding." 1 It 
finds its satisfaction only in protean inconsistency, 
that supplies ever new and changing points of view. 
It denies the supernatural with easy tolerance, born 
of a conviction that no faith is worth a struggle, much 
less a martyrdom. 

It was therefore no favorable sign that so much of 
the best talent of France should have turned to criti- 
cism. Never in its history had systematic criticism 
been more rigorously dogmatic, or psychological criti- 
cism shown more exquisite pow y er of appreciation, than 
from 1880 to 1900, never had critical work been so 
closely followed or met with such reward. A volume 

1 Bourget, Essais, 61, attributes this sentiment to Virgil in a simi- 
lar period of Latin culture. 



THE EVOLUTION OF HISTORY AND CRITICISM. 299 

of psychological studies in literature established the 
fame of Bourget ; the weekly articles of Sarcey, France, 
and Lemaitre were literary events ; the scholarly confer- 
ences of Brunetikre held the close attention of crowded 
lecture rooms ; and these are but first among many. 1 

Among the immediate followers of Taine, Zola alone 
showed great force or originality as a critic, though he 
was much more dogmatic than judicious, and was far 
from practising in his novels the theories that he advo- 
cated in his critical essaj^s. 2 Also related to Taine, 
though fundamentally antagonistic to Zola, is Brune- 
tibve. He shared with Zola Taine's objectivity and 
pessimism ; but he added to this a logical synthesis 
that Zola, as a critic, did not possess. This, with his 
delicate taste and a learning alike minute and immense, 
borne lightly by a style that is always keen and cutting 
and sometimes superciliously contemptuous, made him 
more popular with the public than with his fellow 
critics. 3 He was the most thoroughgoing of critical 

1 It would be unjust not to name, though but in foot-note, £mile 
Eaguet (born 1847), editor of the " Classiques populaires" and author 
of a series of critical studies of the chief writers of the sixteenth, seven- 
teenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Among younger men, 
E. Rod, G. Pellissier, author of the perspicuous u Mouvement litteraire 
au xix. siecle," and several volumes of literary essays, and G. Lanson, 
whose " Histoire de la litterature franeaise " is one of the best popular 
literary histories in any language, deserve special notice. 

2 Especially, Le Roman experimental, 1880; Les Romanciers natu- 
ralistes, 1881 ; Le Naturalisme au theatre, 1881. 

3 Born 1849, died 1906. Principal works : Histoire et litterature, 
3 series, 1884-1886; Etudes critiques, 6 series, 1880-1898; Nouvelles 
questions de critique, 1890; Le Roman naturaliste, 1883; L'Evolution 
des genres, 1890; sqq. Les Epoques du theatre, L'Evolution de la 
poesie lyrique; Manuel de l'histoire de la litterature franeaise, 1897; 
Discours academiques, 1 900. He was for many years editor in chief 
of the " Revue des deux mondes." On the character of Brunetiere's 
criticism, see Lemaitre, Contemporains, i. 217. 



300 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

evolutionists, more intent on "classifying, weighing, 
comparing, than on enjoying or helping others to en- 
joy " (Lemaitre). His great work was to re-establish a 
truer perspective between the Classicists, the eighteenth 
century, the Eomanticists and the present age. Through- 
out he saw only the natural evolution of literary tradi- 
tion ; and while he mocked unsparingly the exaggerated 
pretensions of the Naturalists, he recognized " the justi- 
fication of a movement that has been drawing our 
writers for some years back from the cloudy summits 
of old-time Eomanticism to the level plains of reality." 
Indeed, it should be in the nature of such a critic to 
explain rather than to judge, though Brunetifere was con- 
strained to give a freer scope to individuality in genius 
than accorded with the system of Taine, and allowed him- 
self, while pursuing his undeviating way, to shoot many 
barbed arrows to right and left, especially at Zola and the 
Goncourts, that could not but arouse unnecessary rancor. 
More avowedly subjective, more in the spirit of 
Eenan, is Jules Lemaitre, 1 who began his career as a 
Parnassian poet, and won his first critical successes in 
1884 by essays on Eenan, Zola, and Ohnet. 2 His criti- 
cal style is pregnant and witty, supple and ironical, 
vivacious and picturesque, frequently suggesting Eenan, 
with whose temperament and conception of life he felt 
a strong affinity. Thus he, too, makes no effort to be 

1 Born 1853. Critical essays : Les Contemporains, 5 vols., 1886, 
sqq. Impressions de theatre, 10 vols., 1888-1898; Theories et im- 
pressions, 1904; En Marge des vieux livres, 1905; Racine, 1908. 
Collected tales: Serenus, 1886; Dix contes, 1891; Les Rois, 1893. 
Dramas: Revoltee, 1889; Depute Leveau, 1890; Mariage blanc, 
1891 ; Flipote, 1893 ; Myrrha, 1894 ; Le Pardon, 1895 ; L'Age difficile, 
1895; L'Ainee, 1898; La Massiere, 1905. 

2 "Depuis Particle de M. Lemaitre, bien des gens continuent de lire M. 
Ohnet, mais on ne trouve plus personne qui s'en vante. " Lanson, p. 1 082. 



THE EVOLUTION OF HISTORY AND CRITICISM. 301 

systematic, nor is he anxious for rigid consistency. 
Criticism, he has said, is " a representation of the 
world, like other branches of literature, and hence by 
its nature as relative, as vain, and therefore as inter- 
esting as they." 

But the full flower of critical Eenanism may be seen 
in Anatole France, 1 who, like Lemaitre, began his lit- 
erary career as a Parnassian, and has achieved some 
distinction in fiction by his delicately critical analysis 
of passion, at first playfully tender in its irony, but 
later, under the influence of his critical antagonism to 
Brunetifere, growing keener, stronger, and more bitter. 
In " Thais," which has since been made the subject of 
a popular opera, he has undertaken to show the bond 
of sympathy that unites the pessimistic skeptic to the 
Christian ascetic, since both despise the world ; in " Lys 
rouge " he traces the perilously narrow line that sepa- 
rates love from hate ; and in " Jerome Cogniard " he has 
given us " the most radical breviary of skepticism that 
has appeared since Montaigne." All this is far more the 
fiction of a critic than of a romancer. The stories are 
essays in Eenanism. He says himself that " criticism 
is a sort of novel for the use of circumspect and curious 
minds," since in his view both are essentially autobi- 
ographical. " There is no objective criticism any more 
than there is an objective art. ... To be perfectly frank 
the critic should say, Gentlemen, I propose to talk about 
myself with regard to Shakspere, Racine, Pascal, Goethe." 

1 Born 1844. Principal works — Critical : La Vie litteraire, 2 vols. 
1888, 1892; Histoire contemporaire, 4 vols. 1897-1900; Opinions so- 
ciales, 1902 ; L'lle des Pingouins, 1908 ; Les Contes de Jacques Tourne- 
broche, 1909. Philosophy: Le Jardin d'Epicure, 1894. Fiction: Le 
Crime de Silvestre Bonnard, 1881 ; Thai's, 1890; Les Opinions de 
Jerome Cogniard, 1893; Lys rouge, 1894. Drama: Cramquebille, 
1903. Biography: La Vie de Jeanne d'Arc, 1908. 



302 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

So France's criticism is rather of life than of books, and 
finds its happiest expression in his " Social Opinions " 
and the genial play of irony in the series that he has 
called, not without satire, " Contemporary History," or 
in " Cramquebille," his very successful socialistic drama 
of Parisian life. In biography it is the psychological 
element that dominates his work, as may be seen in his 
recent striking study of " Jeanne d'Arc." 

Criticism appears to Anatole France the most recent 
and possibly the ultimate evolution of literary expres- 
sion, " admirably suited to a highly civilized society, 
rich in souvenirs and old traditions. It proceeds from 
philosophy and history, and demands for its development 
an absolute intellectual liberty. It takes the place of 
theology. The universal doctor, the Thomas Aquinas 
of the nineteenth century, is Sainte-Beuve. ,, " Criticism 
is the last in date of all literary forms, and it will end 
by absorbing them all." 1 

Anatole France is an ideal representative of the dilet- 
tante spirit, combining in his style, as Lemaitre remarks, 
traces of Eacine, Voltaire, Flaubert, and Eenan, but so 
individualized as to become " perfection in grace, the 
extreme flowering of the Latin genius." Meantime the 
mystic side of Eenanism found its expression in Charles 
Morice, 2 the obscure critic of Symbolism ; and while 
each of these — Brunetifere, Lemaitre, France, Morice, 
— was addressing his little cultured company, the great 
mass of the reading and theatre-going public bowed be- 
fore the philistine sceptre of Francisque Sarcey. 3 

1 Vie litteraire, i., Preface (condensed). See also Huneker, Egoists, 
pp. 139-166. 

2 La Litterature de tout a l'heure, 1889. 

3 Born 1828, died 1899 ; journalist since 1858. That his articles were 
not republished in book form contributed to prolong his authority. 



THE EVOLUTION OF LYRIC POETRY. 303 



CHAPTEE IX. 

THE EVOLUTION OF LYRIC POETRY. 

There is a sense in which Hugo is the father of modern 
French poetry, but his descendants have been less 
dutiful than admiring, so that, as has been already said, 
he seems rather to bar the current of poetic evolution 
than to divert or guide it. Hugo's poetic children bear 
the print of his outward features, but they do not 
inherit his hopeful courage. Much of their work is 
of great beauty, and its remarkable variety is of signi- 
ficance in any effort to comprehend the past and to 
foreshadow the near future of French literary genius 
and intellectual life. Yet through all or almost all 
of their writing we may trace beneath the mask of 
Hugo's rhetoric and prosody the spirit of Sainte-Beuve 
and Taine. Pessimism, violent, gloomy, sad, or frivo- 
lous and hedonistic, is the colored thread that runs 
through the warp and woof of fin de siecle verse, both 
among the Parnassian artists for art and in the deca- 
dent or deliquescent schools of Symbolism. There is at 
present a marked reaction toward classical prosody, but 
the advocates of the studiously unconventional still find 
favor. 

The first lyric expression of Eomanticism had been 
fundamentally egoistic and individualized. This is 
characteristic of Lamartine, of Hugo, and of De Musset. 
But as the movement spent its first force, two divergent 
tendencies checked and modified its self-confident 
liberty. First, the socialistic theories that we connect 



304 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

with the names of Fourier and Saint-Simon under- 
mined the political basis of individualism. A discon- 
tented or at least a restless mental state succeeded to 
the hopeful energy of 1830 after the collapse of the 
Eepublic of 1848. This generous discontent found its 
reflection in the sombre, self-centred, yet purposeful 
poetry of De Vigny. On the other hand, the aesthetic 
liberties of the Komanticists, the wanton gambols of 
individualism in metre and language, led inevitably to 
a reaction ; and the exaggerated appreciation of poetic 
form found its completest expression in Gautier. 

These two forces acted together or apart on all forms 
of literature, but in prose fiction they were for a time 
dominated by the genius of Balzac and by the scien- 
tific determinism or skepticism of Taine and Eenan, 
and in the drama their action is obscured, at least in 
the strongest work, by the subordination of art to 
social ethics. The two tendencies appear most plainly 
in poetry, where the traditions of De Vigny are nobly 
upborne by the Parnassians, while in Banville one can 
already trace the incipient decadence toward art for 
artificiality of the school of Gautier, the labored 
futility of whose poetry Banville best reflects in the 
substance of his verses, though in outward form and 
rhyme he illustrates and elaborates the theories of 
Sainte-Beuve. 

In a posthumous essay Banville has described him- 
self as a follower of the Graces of old Greece, while 
the contemporaries of his later years seemed to him wor- 
shippers of the newer graces, Absinthe, Neurosis, and 
Morphine. In claiming this classical affiliation the 
poet wished to class himself with those Parnassians 
who took Hugo for their master in prosody and rhe- 
torical form, while in their hedonistic ethics and in their 



THE EVOLUTION OF LYRIC POETRY. 305 

passionless' objectivity they followed Gautier. The 
very titles of his earlier volumes 2 suggest their impas- 
sive nature. From the very outset he appears as a 
poet of a disillusioned age, a product of the corroding 
spirit of determinism in philosophy and the cynical 
materialism of the Second Empire. He shows no 
faith save in his senses and the joy they bring, the 
delight of eye and ear, the harmony of color and sound. 
He suffered neither anxious thought nor unreasoning 
passion to ruffle his serene calm. 

Like Gautier, Banville wrote a great mass of critical 
but ephemeral feuilletons, some equally ephemeral 
dramas, and an essay on prosody that won him the 
title " Legislator of Parnassus." He wrote also many 
prose tales ; but the best of these ring false in spite of 
their melodious warmth, and the laxity of their morals 
mars the delicate grace of their style, for there is a 
violation of essential congruity when the characters 
of the " Comddie humaine " are dressed in fairy gauze. 
But it is as a poet alone that Banville survives, and 
it is his poetry alone that merits special study. We 
should expect of one who schools himself to hide 
the emotions that survive his philosophy that the 
lyric note of personal experience would be subordi- 
nated to the feelings common to humanity or to de- 
scriptive reproductions of nature and legend as they 

1 Banville was born 1823 and died 1891. (Euvres, 8 vols., 1873-1878, 
and Dernieres poesies, 1893. Chronology of the chief collections: 
Cariatides, 1842; Stalactites, 1846; Odelettes, 1856; Odes funambu- 
lesques, 1857 ; Nouvelles odes funambulesques, 1869 ; Idyles prus- 
siennes, 1871. Dramas: Gringoire, 1866; Socrate et sa femme, 1885. 
Fiction : Contes feeriques ; Esquisses parisiennes, scenes de la vie, 1859. 
Criticism: Traite de la poesie francaise, 1872. Critical articles on 
Banville : Spronck, Les Artistes litteraires, p. 299 ; Lemaitre, Contem- 
porains, i. 7 ; and Nineteenth Century, August, 1891. 

20 



306 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

appear in the posthumous poems of De Vigny. But 
in Banville the substance tends more and more with 
each succeeding collection to become subordinate to 
form, more and more rhyme becomes the chosen field 
for the display of his virtuosity. He revives the arti- 
ficial stanzas of the fourteenth century, the rondeau, 
the triolet, and the rest, and even betters the instruc- 
tion, dancing in his " Odes funambulesques," true 
"Tight-rope Odes," on the wire he has stretched for 
his muse, with an easy assurance that arouses a 
sort of amused admiration for these trifling odelettes, 
frivolous and fanciful, yet in their kind of great 
excellence. 

It is no small thing in an age oppressed with Natu- 
ralism to preserve an inexhaustible flow of gayety, 
though it be empty, — to write, as Lemaitre wittily puts 
it, with the one idea of expressing no idea. Banville 
confesses ingenuously that his ambition is to ally the 
buffoon element to the lyric, while rigorously adhering 
to the form of the ode, and to obtain, as in a true lyric, 
his impression, comic or otherwise, by combinations of 
rhymes and harmonious or peculiar effects of sound. 
He is convinced that the musical effect of verse can 
awaken what it will in the reader's mind, u and even 
create that supernatural and divine thing, laughter," 
as well as "joy, enthusiastic emotion, and beauty." 
Thus he approaches Wagner's theory of a music 
drama, though our poet is more modest in his aspira- 
tions, and indeed only carries to its extreme a device 
practised in all ages of French verse, — by Villon as 
well as Piron, and by none more than by his favorite 
Eonsard. 

The gift of musical speech was his from the first. 
Several poems of his youthful " Cariatides " sing them- 



THE EVOLUTION OF LYEIC POETRY. 307 

selves into the ear with strange melody, 1 and others 
among his satiric verses have a curious metallic quality 
that foreshadows his future mastery. 2 But the elabora- 
tion of many of the later chants royaux and virelais 
must always be caviare to most readers. In these 
wrestlings between the subject and the intricate rhyme, 
the former, even if like Jacob it come off victor, is 
almost sure to have a sinew shrivelled in the contest. 
Yet it is interesting to note that while this will-o'-the- 
wisp rhyme is leading the poet's fancy where it will, 
the very phantasmagoria that it evokes have their 
charm. Our curiosity is excited as we watch the poet 
winding himself out of his own labyrinth; yes, this 
very difficulty gives a fillip to his own imagination, and 
at times reveals to him unexpected flowers of preciosity. 
Such an art of poetry is hardly adapted to serious 
subjects of any kind. His satires are mocking vers de 
societe or laments that pleasures must be bought that 
should be given. 3 Often his thought takes the form of 
parody of some popular piece or style ; or, perhaps, like 
some busy bee of humor, he builds an elaborate fabric 
of formal nonsense where the wit lurks in grotesque 
juxtapositions, fantastic figures, serious verses upset by 
some impertinent bit of slang, the promise of wisdom 
ending in ludicrous commonplace, all clothed in teasing 
rhymes and lit up with countless puns. Twice only 
was Banville betrayed into serious emotion, not much 
to his poetic advantage. Toward the close of the Em- 
pire the counsellors of Napoleon were made the butts 
for the poisoned darts of his satire, and during the 

1 E. g., " Confession," and the second part of the " Songe d'hiver." 

2 E. g., The sixth part of " Ceux qui meurent et ceux qui com- 
battent." 

3 E. g., La Malediction de Venus. 



308 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

siege of Paris the bitterness of unreasoning hate over- 
flowed in his " Idylles prussiennes." But in his nor- 
mal mood Banville much prefers Greek mythology to 
modern politics, 1 and finds his favorite subjects in the 
Eenaissance or in the picturesque aspects of literary 
and artistic Bohemia. The gayety of nocturnal Paris 
tricked out in gauzy spangles has also its charm for 
him ; and so indeed has anything that is quite aside 
from the every-day life and duties of Philistia, for 
which, as for its laureate Scribe, he had a deep and 
life-long aversion. 

Here he is most at home, and paints exquisite pic- 
tures whose clear-cut outlines rival the brilliancy of 
their color, whose every phrase thrills with the joy of 
art and beauty. 2 He is more the artist for art than 
even Gautier, for he has not a trace of that arriere pen- 
see of death that haunts the mediaevalized mind of the 
author of "Albertus." Indeed, Banville is the most 
thorough pagan of all the moderns, light-hearted even 
to his septuagenarian end, and leaving behind him as 
the sum of his ephemeral wisdom the beneficent lines : 

La planete est vieille, mais 
Comme la jeune fille est jeune. 

1 E. g., La Voie lactee, Clymene, Le Jugement de Paris. The last 
is the most elaborate, but all are frigid. 

2 E. g. y among descriptive pieces, L'Exil des dieux, Le Banquet 
des dieux, Le Sanglier, La Mort d'amour, La Fleur de sang, La Rose ; 
among the humorous and gay, Eldorado, En Habit zinzolin, and the 
Odelette a Mery ; as a model of metrical art, the last four lines of 
" Carmen " : — 

II fant a l'hexametre, ainsi qu'aux purs arceaux 
Des e'glises du nord et des palais arabes, 
Le calme pour pouvoir derouler les anneaux 
Saints et mysterieux de ses douze syllabes. 
Noteworthy also are the ten lines that immediately follow, beginning: 
Nous n'irons plus aux bois, les lauriers sont coupe's. 



THE EVOLUTION OF LYRIC POETRY. 309 

Banville's easy cheerfulness, his unruffled optimism 
that persistently closed its eyes to more than half of 
life, will account for the comparative neglect of his 
verses in a time more conscious of its faults than of its 
power to overcome them, an age that found truer repre- 
sentatives of the nobler aspects of its pessimism in the 
Parnassians and a more intense expression of its morbid 
decadent tendencies in Banville's unfortunate friend 
Charles Baudelaire, the progenitor of the latter Symbol- 
ists, who represent a state of weary yet restless reaction 
from the confidence of scientific determinism, to which 
the Parnassians oppose the dignified reserve and stoic 
calm of the philosophic mind. These, therefore, are the 
result in poetry of an earlier phase of the national spirit, 
and for this as well as for their intrinsic qualities they 
have the first claim to our attention. 

It is curious and possibly significant that two of the 
chief Parnassians were not French by birth, and one of 
them not even by descent. Leconte de Lisle, though 
older than either Banville or Baudelaire, was born in 
the island colony of Bdunion, and did not remove per- 
manently to France till 1847, where he at first threw 
himself into the Eepublican agitation with much ardor, 
and so began his literary career later than they after 
his political hopes had been dashed by the coup d'etat. 1 
His "Po&mes antiques" were not published till 1853, 

1 He died in 1894. French criticism of his work may be found in 
Pellissier's Mouvement litteraire, p. 282 ; in Lanson's Litterature 
francaise, p. 1036 ; in Brunetiere's Poesie lyrique and Litterature con- 
temporaine ; in France, Vie litteraire, i. 95, and Lemaitre, Contempo- 
rains, ii. 5. All these have been consulted in the preparation of this 
essay. Cp. also Jean Dornis, Leconte de Lisle intime, in Revue des 
deux mondes, May, 1895, and Paul Monceaux in Revue bleue, June, 
1895. The posthumous " Derniers poemes " appeared, with interesting 
literary essays on his lyric predecessors, in 1895. His " Histoire du 
christianisme " and " Catechisme republicain " were published anony- 
mously. 



310 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

when the position of Banville was already secure. His 
own ascent of Parnassus was more laborious. As late 
as 1867 he could secure but two votes in an election to 
the Academy that resulted in the choice of Sardou, and 
it was not till 1886 that he entered that body, taking 
the seat made illustrious by Victor Hugo, who had been 
one of the two to favor his former candidacy. 

Meantime his literary baggage had been enlarged 
by "Pofemes et poesies " (1855), " Pofemes barbares " 
(1859 and 1862), and "Pokmes tragiques " (1884). 
He had distinguished himself also by admirable trans- 
lations of Theocritus and Anacreon, Hesiod, Homer, 
Sophocles, and iEschylus, studies from which he drew 
much of his own exquisite culture. He had essayed 
Horace also, had practised his pen in criticism, and 
had written two books of a decidedly radical tendency, 
a popular History of Christianity and a Eepublican 
Catechism, which it is but just to say were both pub- 
lished anonymously. But whatever might be the 
spirit of his politics, into his poetry he carried always 
the temper of a scholar and a lover of the classic 
poets, from whom he learned that objectivity which 
enabled him before the publication of Hugo's " Legend 
of the Centuries " to nurse the failing sense for epic 
poetry in France, while at the same time it marked 
his opposition both to the Eomantic School in general 
and to its rebellious offspring, Baudelaire, though it 
is shared in a measure by De Vigny and Gautier. 
Eesembling Banville in his preference for classical 
themes, he differs wholly from him in the serious 
purpose and scientific undercurrent of his verse. " Art 
and science," he says in his preface to the " Po&mes 
antiques," " have long been separated. Now they 
should tend to unite closely if not to mingle. The 



THE EVOLUTION OF LYRIC POETKY. 311 

one has been the primitive revelation of the ideal as 
contained in external nature: the other has been its 
rational study and luminous exposition. But art has 
lost that intuitive spontaneity, or rather it has ex- 
hausted it. Science has for its office to reveal to art 
the sense of its forgotten traditions, which it can then 
revive in artistic form/' In other words, to Leconte 
de Lisle and to the Parnassians who follow him, 
poetry should be naturalistic. But he makes an im- 
portant reserve, for elsewhere he says : " The beauti- 
ful is not the servant of the true, for it contains the 
truth, human and divine." And again he has written : 
" None possesses poetry who is not exclusively possessed 
by it." This, then, is his philosophy of his art, and it 
is in this sense only that he regards that art as an 
end in itself. For he is no juggler with words, still less 
with symbolic impressions. He has always a definite 
image before his poet's eye, a definite purpose in his 
mind, which is indeed no meaner aim than to show the 
gradual unfolding of the ideal life in the human mind, 
to trace the tentative Teachings of religious thought 
into the legendary past and hidden future of the race. 
Such philosophic calm was a refreshing novelty in 
1853. Men called him "First of the Impassives." 
Not that he did not feel, and keenly, — that no 
reader of " Manchy " or of " L'lllusion supreme " 2 could 
fail to perceive, — but that he consistently repressed his 
feeling. He protested, both by precept and example, 
against the " professional use of tears," the " cry of 
the heart," and such like Bomantic devices. For all 
subjectivity that could not be purified of its egoism 
was to him a corruption and cheapening of art, while 

1 Barbares, p. 190; Tragiques, 36. The pages are from the 16mo 
edition. 



312 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

a great poet and an irreproachable artist seemed to 
him " identical terms." 2 Hence, though he would 
have hesitated at Flaubert's oracle, " The idea is born 
of form," he naturally gave more heed to the chastened 
perfection of his prosody than the Eomanticists, while 
allowing his verses less freedom than Banville. They 
are, indeed, the most regular of the period, for the 
most part classic alexandrines after Boileau's heart, 
or, if the Eomantic type of that verse appear, it will 
be in its simplest form. His rhymes, too, are stately, 
though usually rich and often rare. In this, as in his 
style, he approaches the splendid brilliancy of Hugo, 
while nearly attaining the clean-cut cameos of Gautier. 
But his precision, his self-possession, his perfect con- 
trol of all the processes of poetic art, inspire in the 
general reader respectful admiration rather than hearty 
sympathy, and make him particularly the poet's poet. 

In his philosophy this student of religions is as pes- 
simistic, as skeptical, as Baudelaire or De Vigny. 2 He 
makes his Cain — or " Qain," as the name is spelled 
in recent editions — bid defiance to his Judge in 
these words : — 

Thou sad, thou jealous God, who veilest thy face, 
Thou lying God who saidst thy work was good, 
My breath, thou moulder of the antique clay, 
Some day shall rouse thy victim quivering. 
Thou shalt say, Pray ! and he shall answer, No. 3 

1 Cp. Les Montreurs (Barbares, p. 222), hut also Brunetiere, 
Poesie lyrique, ii. 156-163. 

2 Cp. Le Vceu supreme, Aux morts, and Aux modernes (Barbares, 
pp. 219, 232, 356). 

3 It is said that only the intercessions of De Heredia rescued this 
poem from the flames. The lines cited are : — 

Dieu triste, dieu jaloux, qui derobes ta face, 

Dieu qui mentais, disant que ton ceuvre etait bon, 

Mon souffle, o petrisseur de l'antique limon, 

TJn jour redressera ta victime vivace, 

Tu lui diras, Adore; Elle repondra, Non. (Barbares, p. 18.) 



THE EVOLUTION OF LYRIC POETRY. 313 

Like Lucretius, his study of religions has not made 
him love religion. Like G-autier, his only divinity is 
beauty, and to the very last, 1 as we should expect in 
the classical scholar, it is plastic beauty, beauty of 
form that most appeals to him, though there are 
occasional notes of noble patriotism, among which the 
" Sacre de Paris " (Tragiques, 76) is most memorable. 
His interest in religious manifestations is really the 
interest of revolt. For all his apparent calmness, he 
is militant at bottom, thoroughly in touch with the 
restless skepticism of an epoch that is seeking a new 
basis for ethics, and, because it finds none, is forcing 
itself ever to renew its conviction of the insufficiency 
of the old moral sanctions by striving to realize in 
poetic fancy the various solutions that mankind has 
conceived for the eternal problem of life. 

He brings to this task a spirit repelled by the philis- 
tine egoism of Parisian society, and fascinated by the 
overpowering forces of Nature as he has seen her in 
his native tropics. So he comes to look on life as a 
struggle between the soul and the earth-spirit, in the 
body and in the world. Thus impressed and oppressed 
by "the magnificent indifference" of the powers that 
sway the world, he says of Nature : — 

Eor him who knows to penetrate thy paths, 
Illusion wraps thee, and thy surface lies ! 
Beneath thy furies, as beneath thy joys, 
Thy force is without rapture, without rage. 2 

i The last strophe of " Sacrifice," written hut a few days before his 
death, shows the same unconquerable mind as " Dies Irse " : — 
Mais si le ciel est vide, et s'il n'est plus de dieux 
L'amere volupte de souffrir reste encore, 
Et je voudrais, le coeur abime dans ses j T eux [i. e. of beauty] 
Baigner de tout mon sang l'autel ou je V adore. 
2 La Ravine ,de Saint-Gilles. The lines cited are : — 
Pour qui sait p^netrer, Nature, dans tes voies, 
L'illusion t'enserre et ta surface ment! 



314 MODEKN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

His study of history casts a shadow of deeper dis- 
couragement on his vision of life; but he finds in it 
the distraction that Lucretius found in watching the 
sea-fight from the hill, recovering his serenity in the 
contemplation of far-off suffering, and relief from 
the puzzle of his own life in the cyclopean struggles 
of his giant city, Henokia, where Cain rises from 
his tomb to justify his rebellion by making God the 
author of his crime, and declares that he will avenge 
himself by preserving mankind from the threatened 
destruction of the deluge, and by aiding them to shake 
off the dominion of "thy priests, wolves with ravening 
jaws, gorged with fat of men, and thin with rage," until 
the hour shall come when Cain foresees that " God shall 
annihilate himself in his sterility." This " protest," as 
a French critic has called it, "of the body against pain, 
the heart against injustice, and reason against the 
unintelligible," has naturally suggested to many the 
Prometheus of iEschylus and the "Graius homo" of 
Lucretius (i. 66). But in our day the contradictions 
of nature have become more acute, its antinomies 
more obvious, and the need of a solution urges itself 
more imperiously on the human heart, as science en- 
larges the borders of our knowledge and nourishes 
our intellectual pride. And so it is fitting that " Cain " 

Au fond de tes fureurs, corame au fond de tes joies, 
Ta force est sans ivresse et sans emportement. 

(Poemes barbares, p. 176.) 

Compare "La Foret vierge;" "La Fontaine aux lianes;" "La 
Panthere noire ; " " Le Jaguar," parts of which resemble very closely 
the noted "Lowenritt" of Freiligrath ; Les Elephants (Barbares, pp. 
186, 136, 198, 208, 183) ; Midi (Antiques, p. 292). In "Effet de lune" 
and "Les Hurleurs" (Barbares, pp. 211, 172) Nature is a destroyer. 
Karely she shows a milder face, as in " Claires de lune " and " Bernica " 
(Barbares, pp. 178, 205); still more rarely her sublimity, as in " Sommeil 
du condor" (Barbares, p. 193). 



THE EVOLUTION OF LYRIC POETRY. 315 

should be elaborated with all that archaeology and 
anthropology have to teach of primitive man. 

Other poems in this connection deal with heathen 
and Hellenic legends, and many of them show the 
same curious preoccupation with death that haunted 
Gautier and Baudelaire. Such titles as "Dies Irae," 
" Solvet Sseclum," " Les Spectres/' " Fiat Nox," " Mort 
du soleil," "Aux morts," 1 sufficiently suggest the 
nature of these lugubriously beautiful aspirations 
toward Nirvana. "O divine Death," exclaims the 
poet, "deliver us from time, number, space; give us 
back the repose that life has troubled." 2 One cannot 
repress a little smile of irony as one pictures Leconte 
de Lisle at his desk filing these verses, and living on, 
toying with despair. 

From the primeval man and Hebrew tradition the 
poet turns to the more sympathetic mysticism of India. 
Indeed, impelled perhaps by the disappointment of his 
political hopes and by his religious disillusionment, he 
has confessed his attachment to Buddhism and its 
contemplative founder, some part of whose esoteric 
philosophy has passed into the "Vision de Brahma," 
and the "Baghavat," though "Qunacepa" takes us 
back to the still more primitive philosophy that it 
is not the love of Mrvana but the love of youth and 
maid that gives the greatest impulse to effort and 
sacrifice. 

In passing from India to Greece, De Lisle finds 
freer action and greater beauty, but a moral horizon 

1 Antiques, p. 309 ; Barbares, pp. 361, 241, 237, 240, 232. 
2 Et toi, divine Mort . . . 
Affranchis-nous du temps, du nombre, de Tespace 
Et rends-nous le repos que la vie a trouble. 

(Dies Irae, Antiques, p. 311.) 



316 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

always fatalistic, bounded by the grave, and saved 
only from melancholy speculation by national glory 
and personal activity. So he paints them in their 
myths and their worship of beauty. In two dramas, 
whose stately simplicity suggests and almost rivals 
that of iEschylus, he has told the tales of Helen and 
Orestes. Briefer pieces recount the hapless daring of 
Khiron, overbold to conceive gods better than the 
Olympians, and of Niobe, who mourned the van- 
quished Titans. Others are pure idyls of beauty sug- 
gesting Theocritus in all but his unrivalled naivetd 1 
But Nature to him is always forceful, dominant, over- 
coming man and his works, not the kindly nurturing 
mother of the classic poets. 

From Greece we are borne to a field as different 
from it as the Ganges. The Great Migration inspires 
pictures of fierce energy and passion, 2 and the weird 
mythology of the Elder Edda, as told in his legend of 
the Nornes, serves as the psychological preparation 
for the ascetic teaching of the early Christian mis- 
sionaries. Everywhere, from Iceland to the Ganges, 
the poet had found that reflection led men to puzzled 
dissatisfaction with the course of the world ; but no- 
where did he find life held a less precious gift than 
by the race that produced the "Bard of Temrah" 
and invited the " Massacre of Mona." 3 

Of all the world-philosophies the mediaeval Christian 
system is least sympathetic to Leconte de Lisle, 4 per- 
haps because he sees in it what he thinks a perversion 

1 E. g., Glauce, Klytie, La Source (Antiques, pp. 75, 130, 139). 

2 E. g., Le Massacre de Mona, La Mort de Sigurd, Le Cceur de Hjal- 
mar (Barbares, pp. 113, 96, 77). 

3 Barbares, pp. 61, 113. 

4 Cp., especially, Les Siecles maudits, La Bete escarlate (Tragiques, 
pp. 59, 107). 



THE EVOLUTION OF LYRIC POETRY. 317 

of the true message of Christ. Here, first, we find the 
purely satiric vein in " Une Acte de charite " (Bar- 
bares, p. 282), a subject borrowed from the Ehenish 
legend of Bishop Hatto, who burned the mendicants 
in his empty granary, or in the " Paraboles de Dom 
Guy " (Barbares, p. 315), a sermon of mediaeval directness 
on the seven deadly sins and their embodiments in the 
age of the preacher. More completely objective are 
other poems that help us to realize the crushing weight 
on the mediaeval mind of its belief in hell. Especially 
the dehumanizing religion of old Spain, where all 
colors are heightened and all passions intensified, has 
been ruthlessly presented in its barbarity, 1 while 
recently published fragments of De Lisle's posthumous 
" Etats du diable " show that the subject haunted him 
still. 2 

The question of the ages finds no answer in Leconte 
de Lisle. To those who think they know the answer 
he has only a message of warning ; but for those who 
can enjoy poetry apart from its teaching, he has much 
more than that. " There are hours," says Lemaitre, 
" when you are infamous enough to find that Lamar- 
tine says ■ Gnan-Gnan ' and Hugo ' Boum-Boum,' when 
the cries and apostrophes of De Musset 3 seem childish. 
Then you can enjoy Gautier ; but there is something 
better. Never mind if you have n't the great Flaubert 
at hand ; even he has too much feeling. Just read 

1 E. g., L'Accident de Don Inigo, La Tete du comte, La Ximena 
(Barbares, pp. 289, 285, 293). 

2 In the " Revue des deux mondes," 1894. They deal with the Bor- 
gias. There are others in the posthumously published " Derniers 
poemes." 

3 It is to such singers of their own woe that De Lisle addresses the 
scathing sonnet "Les Montreurs " (Barbares, p. 222). A fine instance 
of impassive force is " Le Soir <Tune bataille" (Barbares, p. 230). 



318 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

Leconte de Lisle. For a moment you will have vision 
without pain, the serenity of Olympians, or of Satans 
appeased." 

In 1866 Leconte de Lisle joined with several younger 
poets in "Le Parnasse contemporain," which, being 
followed by two like volumes in 1869 and. 1876, gave 
to the group the name " Parnassians," by which was 
meant the school that prized, above all else, purity and 
beauty of form. Many of the group have attained 
really remarkable excellence in this kind, though their 
production, as is usual with poets of their type, is 
small, slow, and labored. The best continuation of 
De Lisle's spirit is in the Buddhistic poetry of Jean 
Lahor (Dr. Cazalis) 1 and the marionette-plays of 
Maurice Bouchor. 2 His peculiar artistry was best 
learned by De Heredia, who perhaps bettered the 
instruction. 3 

The popularity won by Dr. Heredia at the cen- 
tury's close marked a revival of a stricter taste and 
a reaction against the fantastic license of the school 
of Baudelaire, the Naturalist and Symbolist poets who 
had been most in evidence till then, and to whom we 
shall recur. De Heredia, as his name suggests, was a 
Spaniard, born in" Cuba (1842). Indeed it is a little 
disquieting to see how many foreign names one meets 
in this literary generation, though any literature might 
be glad to welcome such a guest. He is the supreme 
flower of the Parnassian cultus of form, most pictu- 
resque, and so impersonal that his verses have not even 

1 I/Illusion, 1888 and, enlarged, 1893. 

2 Tobie, Noel, Sainte Cecile, Mysteres d'£leusis (1889-1894). 
Lyric : Les Symboles, 1 894. 

3 Cp. Brunetiere, Poesie lyrique, ii. 189 ; Lemaitre, Contemporains, 
ii. 49 ; and Revue bleue, May, 1895. 



THE EVOLUTION OF LYRIC POETRY. 319 

the vague pessimistic gloom of De Lisle, but only a 
sort of expansion of heart at heroism and natural 
beauty, which it will be noticed is the most universal 
sentiment we can conceive. His work, hardly bulkier 
than Gray's, shows the same meticulous polish, and 
the reticence of a conscious artist who is never ready 
to lay aside the literary file. His sonnets would sug- 
gest the " Cameos " of Gautier, save that he has 
learned, perhaps from Verlaine and his Symbolist 
Decadents, the fascination of a delicate vague sugges- 
tion of the subjective that we miss in that hierophant 
of art for art. 

His style is rich and highly colored, but more con- 
densed, plastic, and precise than that of any modern 
French poet, unless it be Sully-Prudhomme. 1 His 
subjects are drawn from his recollections of his native 
Cuba, or out of the wonderful history of the old Span- 
ish conquist adores , from one of whom, a companion of 
Cortes, he is himself descended. The scenes and tra- 
ditions of his youth are reflected everywhere, but with 
them and in them appears the careful literary and 
scientific training of his student years at Havana and 
Paris. 

Out of this combination of a tropical environment, 
heroic ancestry, cloistered training in the humanities, 
and the latest results of modern investigation in the 
precise studies of the Bcole des Chartes, came a half- 
cento of sonnets, so compactly built that every word 
adds at once to the imagery and to the melody. What 
a study, for instance, in the marriage of compression 
and sonorousness is this sonnet on the " Conqu^rants," 

1 The closest analogues to the sonnets of "Les Trophees " (1893) 
are to be found in the sonnets of Sully-Prudhomme^ " l&preuves " 
and "Justice." 



320 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

some part of whose beauty .may not have evaporated 
even from this rhymeless but linear translation : 2 — 

Like flight of falcons from their native quarry, 
Fatigued with bearing their proud misery, 
From Palas de Morguer brigands and captains 
Sailed drunk with brutal and heroic dreams. 
They went to win the metal fabulous 
Cipango ripens in its distant mines, 
And steady tropic winds sloped their lateens 
To the strange borders of the western world. 
Each evening of an epic morrow fain, 
The tropic sea's phosphoric azure glow 
Charmed with mirage of gold their slumberings; 
Or bent on prow of the white caravels 
They watched the climbing in a sky unknown 
Of new stars from the bosom of the sea. 

This whole piece is a study in rhetoric and harmony 
that will repay the most exact analysis, and the same 
heroic epoch has inspired a whole group of sonnets as 
well as several poems that depart from this favorite 
form of the Parnassian muse. 2 Other sonnets are bits 

1 Comme un vol de gerfauts hors du charnier natal, 
Fatigues de porter leurs mi seres hautaines, 
De Palas de Morguer, routiers et capitaines 
Partaient, ivres d'un reve hero'ique et brutal, 
lis allaient conquerir le fabuleux metal 
Que Cipango murit dans ses mines lointaines, 
Et les vents alizes inclinaient leurs antennes 
Aux bords mysterieux du monde occidental. 
Chaque soir esperant des lendemains epiques 
L'azur phosphorescent de la mer des Tropiques 
Enchantait leur sommeil d'un mirage dore ; 
Ou penches a l'avant des blanches caravelles 
lis regardaient monter dans un ciel ignore 
Du fond de l'Ocean des etoiles nouvelles. 
2 E. g., " Conquerants d'or," of which some lines on the setting sun 
are deservedly famous. A translation of Bernal Diaz's " Chronicle " 
is a further witness to De Heredia's loyalty to ancestral memories, 
and his prose romance "La Nonne Alferez" (1894) touches the pica- 
roon side of the same subject. 



THE EVOLUTION OF LYRIC POETRY. 321 

of pure description* among which one notes and admires 
the wholly exotic tone of the Japanese " Sainourai," 
the dazzling colors of "Blason celeste," and the cold 
enamelled brilliancy of the "Bdcif de corail," 1 while 
there is even a breath of human sympathy in "La 
M^daille antique " and " Sur un marbre bris£," and 
this note is carried also into the " Sonnets ^pigraphes," 
where there is a touch of the high-souled melancholy 
that befits the representative of a race whose past glories 
seem to contain no promise for the future. 

In Leconte de Lisle the muse seemed to flee our in- 
hospitable age ; in De Heredia she wrapped herself in 
splendid imagery and philosophic contemplation. Mean- 
time a more genuinely popular note was struck by 
Manuel and Coppee, who cultivated the field that 
Sainte-Beuve had planted, the descriptive poetry of 
common life, and so made themselves the poetic rep- 
resentatives of the Naturalistic School, though they are 
less thoroughgoing in meditating that thankless muse 
than the vociferous Bichepin 2 or even than the oc- 
casional ventures in this field of Maupassant and the 
versatile Verlaine. Both Coppee and Manuel com- 
promised a little with idealism, approaching perhaps 
most nearly to the model Sainte-Beuve had set up for 
himself in the " Pensdes de Joseph Delorme." " I 

1 The last six lines are peculiarly praiseworthy : — 
De sa splendide ecaille eteignant les emaux, 

Un grand poisson navigue a travers les rameaux [i. e. of the coral], 
Dans 1'onde transparente indolemment il rode ; 
Et brusquement, d'un coup de sa nageoire en feu, 
II fait dans le cristal morne, immobile et bleu, 
Courir un frisson d'or, de nacre et d'e*meraude. 
2 Chansons des gueux, 1876; Les Blasphemes, 1884; Mes paradis, 
1894 ; Chemineau, 1897 ; La Martyre, 1898 ; Don Quichotte, 1905. A 
dramatic conte bleu, Vers la joie, 1894, and the novels Flamboche, 1895, 
and Lagebasse, 1900, show idealistic and religious tendencies. 

21 



322 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

have tried," he said, "to be original in my fashion, 
humbly, like a bourgeois, watching closely the soul and 
nature, naming things of private life by their com- 
mon names, but trying to relieve the prosaic side 
of these humble details by descriptions of human 
sentiments and natural objects." In this style Man- 
uel * printed three collections of poems, " Pages 
intimes" (1866), "Pendant la guerre" (1871), and 
"Pofemes populaires" (1871), which won so great a 
popular success that a selection from them, " Podsies 
de l'^cole et du foyer " has been made for the use of 
French schools. 

This domestic genre was almost immediately adopted 
by Copp^e, 2 who called Leconte de Lisle his master, 
though he seems rather an original genius of a second- 
ary rank. He wrote short stories and many dramas of 
sentiment, but it is as a poet that he must be studied, 
for it is the poetic element in his prose, and the epic 
or lyric note in his dramas, that gives them their 
peculiar charm. He began as a true Parnassian, an 
artist in verse who rejoiced in his handiwork and was 
skilled in all the mysteries of the craft, though not 

1 Born 1823. He published also a fourth collection of poems, " En 
voyage," 1881, and several popular dramas. His profession was 
pedagogy. 

2 Born 1842, died 1908. He collaborated in the " Parnasse contem- 
porain " of 1866. His poems are collected under the titles : Le Reli- 
quaire, 1866; Intimites, 1868; Poemes modernes, 1869; Les Humbles, 
1872; Le Cahier rouge, 1874; Olivier, 1875; Pendant le siege, 1875; 
Exilee, 1876 ; Les Mois, 1877 ; Le Naufrage, 1878 ; Dans la priere et dans 
la lutte, 1901. Many dramas since 1869 and prose tales since 1880. 
Essays: Mon franc parler, 1894. La Bonne souff ranee, 1898, records 
his penitent return to the Church. 

Criticism : Brunetiere Poesie lyrique, ii. 1 89 ; Lemaitre, Contempo- 
rains, i. 79 ; France, Vie litteraire, i. 156. 



THE EVOLUTION OF LYRIC POETRY. 323 

without some taint of sentimental tinsel and a little of 
Gautier's indifference to the moral bearing of his work. 
Typical of this period is " Les Intimites," while four 
years later " Les Humbles," beneath their languorous 
coquetry, facile suavity, and fleeting grace that suggest 
Banville, struck quite another, a deeper, possibly also 
a higher note. Here, with studied simplicity and a 
beauty not without its sternness, he wrote the lyric 
of poverty and self-denial, the poetry of democracy. 
We see a band of emigrants forced to leave the only 
land they know, and looking to the future less with 
hope than with frightened anxiety ; we are shown 
the nurse who returns from her city charge to find 
her own cradle empty, the son who toils his life out 
for his mother, and the domestic troubles of a " petit 
Spicier." That Copp^e's sympathy for the " humble " 
was genuine, earlier pieces, such as " The Blacksmiths' 
Strike " and " Angelus," attest ; but he lacked sustained 
energy, and occasionally fell into a jesting trivial- 
ity that grates on a sensitive ear. All this is laid 
aside, however, in " Pendant le sifege," poems that ring 
with a true patriotism in defeat, and indignation at 
the Commune, that " insurrection of instincts without 
a country and without a God ; " and these cries of pain 
are followed by a little group of " Promenades et in- 
tdrieurs " which are perhaps the best poetic expression 
of modern Parisian life. 

But the sobering effect of 1871 soon gave place to a 
gentler vein of poetic narration, suggesting now the 
dryad, now the faun, and occasionally the satyr. The 
domestic idyl has seldom found a prettier expression 
than in " Jeunes filles " and " Les Mois ;" and in a few 
later poems, such as "La T§te de la sultane " and " La 
Vieille," he has revealed an unsuspected tragic strength 



324 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

that his dramas attempt in vain. 1 But it is for his 
stories of the Parisian workman and lower middle 
class that Coppde will be remembered, for whether 
writing in prose or verse he is essentially a story-teller. 
Indeed, in recent years he seems to have doubted 
if poetry were after all the fittest vehicle for a sympa- 
thetic expression of democratic realism. In lyrics, at 
least, " the mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure," 
and a truly realistic description of prosaic conditions 
will be more effective in prose. Hence "Contes ra- 
pides " (1888) has more readers, though less artistic 
value, than u Les Humbles." 

Allied to the Parnassians by the chastened severity 
of his style, though gradually separated from them in 
recent years by a more sympathetic subjectivity, is 
the philosopher among French poets, Sully-Prud- 
homme, 2 who was born in Paris in 1839, and began 
the study of engineering, — an exact discipline that may 
account for some qualities in his poetic work. His 
first essay in verse, " Stances " (1855), won immediate 
popularity for its delicate elegiac sentiment, and con- 
vinced the poet of his calling. Possessed of an inde- 
pendent fortune and affected with a weakness of the 
eyes, he abandoned his profession and gave himself up 
to poetry, at first wholly in the lyric and elegiac man- 
ner, polishing trifles with an amateur's delight, till at 
last his vocation for serious and philosophic subjects 

1 His best tragedies are " Severo Torelli " and " Pour la couronne ; " 
the best comedies, " Le Luthier de Cremone " and " Le Tresor." 

2 Les Epreuves, 1865; Les Solitudes, 1869; Les Destius, 1872; 
Vaines tendresses, 1875 ; Le Prisme, 1886 ; and two epics, La Justice, 
1878; LaBonheur, 1888; fipaves, 1908. Criticism: Lemaitre, Con- 
temporains, i. 31 and iv. 199 ; France, Vie litteraire, i. 156 and ii. 36 ; 
Brunetiere, Litterature contemporaine, 81, and Poesie lyrique au xix. 
siecle. 



THE EVOLUTION OF LYRIC POETRY. 325 

appeared in his striking preface to a translation of a 
portion of Lucretius' poem on " The Nature of Things " 
(1869). From this time metaphysics struggled with 
poetry, till they fairly got the upper hand in the epics 
" Justice " and " Bonheur," the best of the few long 
poems in modern French literature. 

But from the first his poetry had been thoughtful, 
aspiring to sound new depths " in the ocean of the 
soul," and taking for its field " all human history and 
human nature." x While essentially realistic, Sully- 
Prudhomme was not so pessimistic as most of his fellow 
poets. He saw good in evil, 2 and had a healthy faith 
in the value of struggle and action. He felt all the 
baseness that exasperated Baudelaire, but he believed 
that the spur of pleasure and ambition would uncon- 
sciously lead society upward, and for the declamatory 
gloom of De Musset's " Eolla " he had only indignant 
impatience, basing his opposition to the Eomantic 
maladie du siecle on a rational positivism. 3 It is inter- 
esting and a little amusing to contrast the realistic psy- 
chology of love in " Jeunes Filles " or in " Femmes," 
with the nebulous sentiment of Lamartine or the gush 
of De Musset. None has ever caught so well as he, says 
Lemaitre, the awakening of love in a boy, his thrill at 
the caress of a young girl, and later his manifold and 
hidden loves, the delicious beginnings of the first real 
passion, the pain of jealousy, intensified by the feel- 
ing that he is powerless to add to the happiness 
of her who has preferred another. The style of this 

1 "Le Vase briseY' the most popular and hackneyed of the " Stances," 
is not characteristic of the collection. 

2 E.g., the close of " Amerique." 

3 Cp. Joug, Parole, Dans la rue. Even the pessimism of " Ren- 
dezvous " and especially of " Vceu n is not without a sympathetic 
tone. 



326 MODEBN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

work, as of all that follow, combines the precision 
of the Parnassians with something of the oratori- 
cal swing of Hugo, and finds in the development of 
metaphor and in the sonnet its fullest and favorite 
expression. 

"Les Epreuves" is a collection of these sonnets, 
more sombre than " Stances " and more philosophic. 
He groups his poems under the heads Love, Doubt, 
Dream, Action. His Doubts reach their sharpest 
articulation in the " Cri perdu " of the forced laborers 
on the pyramids that " mounts, rises, seeking gods and 
justice, while for three thousand years Cheops, be- 
neath that huge monument, sleeps in unalterable 
glory," 1 but they find their most philosophic expres- 
sion in such lines as "God is not nothing, but God is 
no one, God is all," 2 or " Strange truth . . . that the 
universe, the all, should be God, and not know it." 3 
Such thoughts lead him to self-forgetful reflection, to 
dreams of communion with universal nature from 
which he rises to the more hopeful strains of "En 
avant," "Koue," "Fer," "Le Monde a nu," "Les 
T^m^raires," true poems of this age of exploration, 
invention, and research. His " Zenith," a little later, 
is a noble hymn to science, grand in its simple and 
sober imagery as it tells in Miltonic lines the advance 
of the human mind, and closes with a superb vision of 
aeronauts who, to extend the bounds of knowledge, 

1 H monte, il va, cherchant les dieux et la justice, 
Et depuis trois mille ans sous l'enorme batisse 
Dans sa gloire, Cheops inalterable dort. 
2 Dieu n'est pas rien, mais Dieu n'est pas personne : il est Tout. 

(Les Dieux.) 
8 Etrange verite . . . 
Que TUnivers, le Tout, soit Dieu sans le savoir ! 

(Scrupule.) 



THE EVOLUTION OF LYRIC POETRY. 327 

ascend ever higher in their self-immolation till they 

sink lifeless : — 

Ye cast your bodies, a last weight, to earth, 
And letting fall the veil of mystery, 
Ye finished your ascent uncompanied. 1 

Though, as a disciple of Comte, Sully-Prudhomme must 
needs cautiously add that their immortality is in their 
work and example, in the loving memory of mankind. 

The war and its disasters, that roused in Hugo an 
eloquent but false and sentimental cosmopolitanism, 
filled Sully-Prudhomme with a nobler patriotism. " I 
have a heart for my country that overflows her borders ; 
the more I am French the more I feel myself human." 
If he is not yet naturally hopeful, he is stronger for 
the experiences of 1871. The " Solitudes " of 1869 had 
been almost feminine in their delicate melancholy, 
a note that can be most readily caught from these 
lines on boys' first days at boarding-school, a favorite 
declamation piece in France : — 

Leurs blouses sont tres bien tirees, 
Leurs pantalons en bon etat, 
Leurs chaussures toujours cirees, 
lis ont Fair sage et delicat. 

Les forts les appellent des filles, 
Et les malins des innocents ; 
lis sont doux, ils donnent leurs billes, 
lis ne seront pas commergants. 

Oh ! la lee, on qui n'est pas sue, 
Le devoir qui n'est pas fini : 
Une reprimand e regue : 
Le deshonneur d'etre puni ! 



1 Vous les avez jetes, dernier lest, a la terre 
Et, laissant retomber le voile du mystere 
Vous avez acheve Tascension tout seuls. 



328 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

lis songent qu'ils dormaient nagueres, 
Douillettement ensevelis, 
Dans les berceaux, et que les meres 
Les prenaient parfois dans leurs lits. . . . 

(Premiere solitude.) 

In the " Vaines tendresses " of six years later this 
melancholy has become more profound, the revelation 
of the sources of human suffering more complete. 
To the author of " Kendez-vous," half poetry, half 
music, the world seems not more evil but more sad, 
and in " Voeu " the poet, in a Malthusian mood, 
noting how "multitudes increase upon this plague- 
infested earth," determines for sweet compassion's 
sake, to let his " best-loved son, who shall never be 
born, remain in the nameless realm of the potential. 
Better guarded than the dead, more inaccessible, 
thou shalt not issue from the shadow where once 
I slept." 1 Both this collection and " Les Destins " 
of 1872 end with verses on Death, the great 
consoler. 

The philosophic mind whose progress has been 
traced in other collections, is the warp and woof of 
" Les Destins," which grapple with the fundamental 
antinomies of life. 

The world . . . 
Hides a profound accord of balanced destinies . . • 
Not small nor bad it is, nor great nor good . . . 
To thee who makest each being serve all others, 
Nothing is good or bad, but all is rational. 

1 Demeure dans 1 'empire innomme du possible, 
O fils le plus aime, qui ne naitras jamais. 
Mieux sauve que les morts et plus inaccessible, 
Tu ne sortiras pas de Tombre oil je dormais. 
Compare also the " Volupte " and " Souhait " of this collection. 



THE EVOLUTION OF LYRIC POETRY. 329 

Measuring never by my petty fortune 
Evil or good, I tread my narrow path 
Calm, as an atom in the void, and vow 
My humble part to thy whole masterpiece. 1 

This brings us naturally to " Justice " and " Bonheur," 
the two great French philosophic poems of this century. 
The former is divided into vigils, where alternate son- 
nets and replies of three quatrains and a couplet keep 
up a sort of dialogue between the aspirations of the 
poet in his search for Justice and the cruel mockery 
of his experiences. Each sonnet marks a step in his 
inquiry, which is conducted in rigid logical sequence. 
Among men, as among States, the poet discerns only 
selfishness, and Nature has taught him the pitiless 
doctrine of its struggle for life and the survival of the 
fittest. This negative part of the work is more satis- 
factory, and possibly more sincere, than the positive, 
which seeks the categorical imperative in the demand 
that each be accorded its true worth, so that from each 
the best may be drawn for all. The poet finds Justice 
at last only where he felt it at first, in his conscience, 
and sacrifices the consistency of his reasoning to his 
soul's sincerity. 

In " Bonheur " also the heart plays tricks with the 
cobwebs of the brain. The moral appears to be that 
we can imagine no condition of life better than our 

1 I/univers . . . 
Cache un accord profond des Destins balances . . . 
Ni petit ni mauvais, il n'est ni grand ni bon . . . 
Pour toi qui fais servir chaque etre a tous les autres, 
Rien n'est bon ni mauvais, tout est rationnel. 
Ne mesurant jamais sur ma fortune infime 
Ni le bien ni le mal, dans mon etroit sentier 
J'irai calme, et je voue, atome dans Tabime, 
Mon humble part de force, a ton chef-d'oeuvre entier. 



330 MODEKN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

own ; that the mind, like a kaleidoscope, can only re- 
arrange its sense-perceptions ; that we form our picture 
of heaven by negation of evil and elimination of pain. 
But where there is no pain, there is no incitement to 
effort, and existence lacks its purpose and motive power. 
This thesis the poet undertakes to prove by the 
experience of Faustus and Stella, two lovers parted 
on earth and united in an extra-terrestrial paradise, 
very like earth save that its inhabitants are vegetarians, 
delighted 

To see no longer hanging in the shambles 

Corpses laid open, 
That human flesh, nourished by other flesh, 
May nourish some day worms. 1 

They live rather on odors and flowers ; their joy is 
in harmony of colors, and in a love freed from the 
exigencies of physical existence. No wonder this 
Lalla Eookh paradise did not satisfy Faustus, and he 
turned to the pursuit of knowledge. "A torment 
broods over my joy," he says, " for beneath the most 
charming object I long to know what it conceals." 
In short, " the evil of the unknown had already tempted 
him." The exposition that follows of philosophic sys- 
tems and scientific theories is admirable as a poetic 
tour de force, but it brings Faustus no nearer his goal, 

till 

The phantom of truth . . . 
Lets sink unsatisfied at last his brow- 
On which the wing of doubt beats sure of prey. 2 

1 Qu'il fait hon ne plus voir pendre a la boucherie 

Les cadavres ouverts, 
Pour que Thumaine chair par d'autres chairs nourrie 
Nourrisse un jour des vers. 

2 Le fantome du vrai . . . 

Laisse enfin retomber son front inassouvi, 
Que bat l'aile du doute assure de sa proie. 



THE EVOLUTION OF LYRIC POETRY. 331 

Now first can the plaint of mankind that has been 
ever ascending and filling all space reach the ears of 
Faustus and Stella. They lack the joy of sacrifice to 
make their felicity supreme, 

For man enjoys not long without remorse 
Aught save the goods he buys by struggles dear. 
True joy is only in the sense of worth. 1 

From this moment the poem breathes a loftier and 
more sympathetic spirit. Faustus will descend to earth 
to teach men higher wisdom, though he must suffer 
with them. But long ages have elapsed since their 
change of state, and they find the human race vanished 
from a globe now peopled only by plants and animals. 
Nor will they repeople it. for without its torments life 
would lose its grandeur, a grandeur that made it prefer- 
able to the blissful existence whence they came. So 
they leave earth again, reconciled by their martyrdom 
of will to the joys of paradise. The conclusion is a 
curious paradox. Life is sorrowful and sad, but it 
would be worse if it were better. True happiness, it 
seems, involves sacrifice and suffering ; and as Lemaitre 
has suggested, "Bonheur" might as well be called 
" Malheur." 

The great service of Sully-Prudhomme to French 
poetry is that he has best translated into its language 
the new range of emotions of our scientific age. He is 
simple, strong, sincere, possibly even too conscientious 
and too labored in his eagerness to unite the fullest 
truth with the greatest art. " Perhaps no poet," says 
Brunetifere, " ever lived the life of his contemporaries 

1 Car Fhomme ne jouit longtemps et sans remords 
Que des biens cherement payes par ses efforts . . . 
II n'est vraiment heureux qu'autant qu'il se sent digne. 



332 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

more fully, none has ever translated better its noblest 
unrest." 

But beside this noble unrest there is an ignoble rest- 
lessness ; and this morbid decadent tendency found an 
early and intense expositor in Banville's unfortunate 
friend Charles Baudelaire, the progenitor of the modern 
Symbolists, in whom we find the poetic expression of a 
state of weary yet restless reaction from the confidence 
of scientific determinism, a sort of literary hyper- 
esthesia, rising at times to a real emotional hysteria. 
It is from him, the most melancholy of the adepts of 
shudder and woe, that Verlaine and his fellows have 
drawn the solvent poison of their fascination. It is 
only through understanding him that we shall under- 
stand them ; and it is worth while to understand them, 
not so much for what they are as for what they promise 
and indicate. 

Baudelaire 1 was a Parisian, and two years the senior 
of Banville. A voyage to India in his youth left a 
deep impress on his mind that is reflected in the imagery, 
the colors, and the odors of his poetry. His unevent- 
ful literary career began with critical articles in Parisian 
journals that at the time attracted little attention, but 
seem now to show remarkable keenness and foresight, 
so that, as Brunetifere observes, they deserve to be 
" read, reread, and retained " (Podsie lyrique ii. 139). 
However, the first of his works to exercise strong influ- 
ence on his contemporaries was his translation of Poe's 



1 Born 1831 ; died 1867. Fleurs du mal, 1857, and with a preface 
by Gautier, 1868; CEuvres, 7 vols., 1868. Criticism: Spronck, Les 
Artistes litteraires, 83 ; Bourget, Essais de psychologie contempo- 
raine, i. 3; Lemaitre, Contemporains, iv. 17 j Pellissier, Mouvement 
litteraire, 279 ; Lanson, Litterature, 1034. See also Fortnightly Re- 
view, June, 1891. 



THE EVOLUTION OF LYRIC POETRY. 333 

tales in 1856. This was followed in the next year by 
a volume of poems under the strange title " Flowers of 
Evil," six of which were such rank blossoms as to be 
condemned by the squeamish censors of the Second 
Empire. But not even this advertisement aroused any 
general interest in the book during the lifetime of the 
author. Indeed the tide did not turn till after the 
German war ; but it has since set so steadily that work 
which he himself would probably have rejected has 
been gathered into a posthumous volume (1887). 

The important place that is now accorded to these 
" Flowers of Evil " is partly due to their anticipation 
of a morbid pessimism, more common now than in his 
day, and partly no doubt to the warm appreciation with 
which Gautier returned the dedication to him of the 
" Fleurs du mal " as to " the impeccable poet " in a long 
essay prefixed to the edition of 1868. This appreciation 
was however too tardy to bring any balm to Baudelaire's 
perturbed spirit, for he had already died in a hospital 
after a year of semi-lunacy, induced, at least in part, 
by the excessive use of nervous stimulants. Perhaps 
this was the end that he would have desired, for he 
tells us that " he cultivated hysteria with delight and 
terror." 

To Baudelaire nature seems evil, and so all that is 
natural becomes hateful. If, like Gautier, he is haunted 
by visions of death, he does not shrink from them. 
Rather does he take a mournful pleasure in sensations 
of decay and corruption, believing, like that old nihilist 
Mephistopheles, that all is worthy of perishing. How far 
this pessimism is sincere, how far it is perverse, is hard 
to determine. Certainly in his expression of it there 
is much that is forced and intentionally brutal, together 
with passages of curious idealism, that seem like the 



334 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

lees of the Eomantic wine, " the last convulsion of ex- 
piring individualism." " Oh death/' he exclaims, 

" Pour out thy poison that it may comfort us ! 
We wish, so much this fire burns our brains, 
To plunge to the gulfs bottom, heaven, hell, what reck we ? 
To the bottom of the unknown to find the new." * 

Baudelaire clothes his weird subjects in a form more 
restrained and within its own limits almost as masterly 
as Hugo's. He sought his vocabulary largely in the 
Latin poets of the decadence, and defended his choice 
with his wonted perversity, as " singularly fitted to ex- 
press passion such as the modern world understood and 
felt." "If his bouquet is composed of strange flow- 
ers, metallic colors, and heady perfumes ... he can 
reply that hardly any others grow in this black soil, 
saturated with the decay of corruption, like the ceme- 
tery sod of decrepit civilizations in which are dissolv- 
ing amid mephitic miasmas the corpses of foregone 
centuries." 2 

The first "Flower" in Baudelaire's garden gives the 
reader fair warning, for it assures us that we are all 
" hypocritical slaves " of ennui " most ugly, fierce, un- 
clean in the infamous menagerie of our vices." This 
thought he develops in the one hundred and seven 
poems of " Spleen and Ideal," where shuddering at the 

1 O Mort . . . 
Verse-nous ton poison pour qu'il nous reeonforte ! 
Nous voulons, tant ce feu nous brule le cerveau, 
Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu'importe ? 
Au fond de l'lnconnu pour trouver du nouveau. 
(Page 351, edition of 1892, from which all paged citations are hereafter 
made.) Cp. also his Poem in Prose, " N'importe ou hors du monde," 
and in the " Fleurs," numbers lxxviii.-lxxx., xc, cli. 8. 
2 Gautier, Preface (freely translated). 



THE EVOLUTION OF LYEIC POETEY. 335 

vileness of life alternates with aspirations for a serene 
emancipation from it that the poet has not the strength 
of will to attain. Throughout, the imagery is less of 
the eye than of touch and odors. There is an East- 
Indian sensitiveness to perfumes. Some seem to him 
fresh, some green as nature, some proud, some fierce, 
some purifying. Again and again he recurs to their 
intoxicating fascination, which they share with cats, to 
whom are especially dedicated three poems (pp. 135, 
161, 189) which it is curious to compare with Taine's 
sonnet to his favorite cat, — a type, says Mr. Monod, 
of his own softened, reasonable stoicism. Baudelaire's 
intense imagination pictures these disdainers of their 
masters as they haunt the darkness with their phos- 
phorescent eyes and electric skins, and he finds a charm 
in their silent movements and their mysterious treach- 
ery. Indeed, as Gautier wittily observes, " Baudelaire 
himself was a voluptuous cat, with velvety ways and 
mysterious manner, delicate, caressing, supple, strong, 
fixing on things and men a gaze of disquieting bright- 
ness, free, wilful, difficult to restrain, but without per- 
fidy and faithfully attached to those to whom he had 
once offered his sympathy." Baudelaire's tabbies are 
worthy companions of Gray's " pensive Selima." But 
it must be admitted that his women are less pleasing. 
True "flowers of evil," all are corrupt, insatiable, incapa- 
ble of love, instruments of degradation and torture, — 
all save the unattainable Beatrix of his poet's vision. 1 

1 Perhaps the most noted pieces in " Spleen et ideal " are : " Bene- 
diction," a morbid picture of the torture of his poet's life ; " La Vie 
anterieure," a vision of Indian serenity, wealth, and perfume that can- 
not still his languishing secret grief ; " Don Juan aux enfers," impassive 
and impenitent ; and H Une Charogne," whose ghastly suhject, a putre- 
fying corpse, has maintained for forty years its bad eminence as the 
most horrible poem in the language. 



336 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

Many of these poems are strong, and some are beau- 
tiful ; but their beauty is awful, grewsome, satanic. 
Less forced is the pessimism of his "Parisian Pic- 
tures," several of which are in lighter and more sympa- 
thetic vein, and some mere airy fantasies. Of them 
all, perhaps that which clings most to the mind is 
" Les Petites vieilles," the wretched wrecks of a youth 
too gay, who bear with them always some pathetic 
token of the primrose path on their stony descent 
to the grave. Five poems on wine that follow bring 
us back to a morose ferocity, that rises to delirious 
intensity in " Le Vin de l'assassin," the inebriate mur- 
derer who rejoices that his wife is dead because now 
he can drink his fill without being racked by her 
reproachful cries. 1 Noteworthy among later poems is 
the Dantesque imagery of "Femmes damndes" and 
the melancholy ferocity of " Les Deux bonnes soeurs," 
debauchery and death, " whose ever virgin flanks, 
draped in rags, travail in eternal fruitlessness." 2 But 
perhaps the climax of the whole is reached in his 
"Kevolt," where beneath this demoniacal galling the 
poet becomes so possessed by the spirit of evil as to 
conceive the heritage of Satan to be the noblest aspira- 
tion of the human soul. A few lines may not be 
without interest as illustrations of this curious mental 
aberration: — 

Verily, as for me I will leave content 
A world where deed is not sister of thought. 
May I use the sword and perish by the sword. 
Saint Peter denied Jesus ... He did well. 

1 Ma femme est morte, je suis libre ; 
Je puis done boire tout mon soul. 
Lorsque je rentrais sans un sou 
Ses cris me dechiraient la fibre. 
2 Dont le flanc toujours vierge et drape de guenilles 
Sous Teternel labeur n'a jamais enfante. 



THE EVOLUTION OF LYRIC POETRY. 337 

Again he bids " the race of Cain ascend to heaven 
and cast God down to earth," and finally closes his 
satanic and superb " Litany to Satan " with these 
words : — 

Glory and praise to thee, O Satan, in the highest 
Heaven where once thon reignedst and in the depths 
Of hell where vanquished thou in silence dream'st. 
Beneath the tree of knowledge let my soul 
Eepose by thee that day when o'er thy brow 
Like a new house of God its branches shall extend, 1 

This is an obvious climax ; and with a short epilogue 
of Death, where "from top to bottom of the fatal 
ladder " the poet discerns only " the weary spectacle 
of immortal sin," 2 the "Fleurs du nial" come to their 
wild end. 

These one hundred and fifty-one poems are short, 
compactly built, and carefully polished in their labori- 
ous moral paradoxes, like fungus growths or noxious 
bacilli, that find in this rich brain their natural nidus 
and full nourishment. His prose works furnish an 

1 Certes, je sortirai, quant a moi, satisfait 
D'un monde ou Taction n'est pas la soeur du reve, 
Puisse-je user du glaive et perir par le glaive : 
Saint Pierre a renie Jesus . . . il a bien fait ! 



Eace de Cam au ciel monte 
Et sur la terre jette Dieu 



Gloire et louange a toi, Satan, dans les hauteurs 
Du Ciel ou tu regnas, et dans les profondeurs 
De l'Enfer, ou, vaincu, tu reves en silence ! 
Fais que mon ame un jour, sous l'Arbre de Science 
Pres de toi se repose, a Theure, ou sur ton front 
Comme un Temple nouveau ses rameaux s'epandront. 
2 Du haut jusques en bas de Techelle fatale 
Le spectacle ennuyeux de l'immortel peche. 
22 



338 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

herbarium of equally startling exotic flowers, and give 
a clew to the botany of this literary genus. In his 
" Fusses " we may read that the supreme and unique 
joy of love lies in the certainty of doing injury. " All 
joy is based on evil," a topsy-turvy notion by no means 
original with Baudelaire, for it had been preached with 
equal perversity some decades before he was born by 
the Marquis de Sade. 1 In this spirit he defines a 
young girl as the being that "unites the greatest 
imbecility to the greatest depravity/' and thinks the 
very worst charge against woman to be that " she is 
natural, that is to say, abominable." After this one is 
prepared for his avowal: "It has always seemed to 
me horrible to be a useful man." 

All this is not only the contradiction of common 
sentiment but of common sense. Yet, though Baude- 
laire himself warns us that " a little of the charlatan 
is always permissible to genius," he seems to have 
schooled himself into a certain sincerity of self-contra- 
diction, worshipping Satan while he clung to Catholi- 
cism, and becoming toward the close of his life morosely 
ascetic in resolution and extravagantly hedonistic in 
action. He united three discordant elements, — the 
philosophy of science, the ethics of materialism, and 
the mysticism, though not the faith, of mediaeval 
demoriology ; that is to say, in his theory and in his 
practice he was a decadent, one who put his new wine 
into an old bottle, a man out of place in his social 
environment, and so tending, as science tells us that 
all misplaced organic matter does, to disintegration. 2 

1 The curious may consult Jules Blais, Satanisme (1895), with a 
preface by the novelist Huysmans, and Bois, Les Petites religions de 
Paris (1894). 

2 Cp. Bourget, 1. c. 24, for a discussion of the philosophy of deca- 
dence. 



THE EVOLUTION OF LYRIC POETRY. 339 

This contradiction in the poet's mind is reflected in 
his work. The new and the old, Eomanticism and 
Naturalism, dwell in him side by side, — spiritual ideals 
with putrefying corpses, the most diseased sensuality 
with the most exalted asceticism, or, in his own words, 
" ecstasy of life and disgust of life." He hates woman 
with a mystic mediaeval hatred, and in spite of this, 
or because of it, he unites a passionate cult to his bit- 
ter contempt, as though he were trying to realize that 
complete debauchery of the will which reasons that 
since what is natural is evil, what is artificial must 
be virtuous and good. But this is pessimism reduced 
to the absurd, just as the same doctrine in aesthetics 
is the reduction to the absurd of art. 

This state of mind has long ceased to be exceptional. 
Deep discontent with the social order, if not with the 
moral order, of the world is almost a sign of the times. 
In politics it shows itself in nihilistic, anarchic, and 
socialistic dreams ; Schopenhauer's popularity reflects 
it in philosophy, while in literature Hardy in England, 
Sudermann in Germany, and Maupassant in France 
typify a moral unrest. But this is as much as to 
say that Baudelaire's aesthetics are a house built on 
sand, that his efforts and those of his followers are 
foredoomed to an impotent and lame conclusion. 
There can be no lasting fame for decadence. And 
yet the work of this forerunner has an exquisitely 
poisonous originality that preserves his memory as in 
arsenic green. Who before him ever sang with such per- 
verse genius that health was disgusting, that enamel 
and rice powder were lovelier than red cheeks, that 
the odors of the laboratory were purer than those of 
the garden, and that no hues of life were so fair as 
those of phosphorescent decay ? Madame de Stael, for 



340 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

all her theory of progress, hesitated to prefer Latin 
literature to Greek, but Baudelaire did not shrink from 
proclaiming that Petronius was superior to Virgil. 
He would have for his muse " no matron repulsive in 
her healthy virtue." Artificiality, formal elaboration, 
" the absolute expression," the union of harmony and 
melody, of form and tone, was his Sisyphean ambition, 
as it had been that of Banville, whom in his minor 
key Baudelaire equalled and perhaps surpassed. It is 
said that he carried this endeavor even into the modu- 
lations of his conversation, rejoicing in the music of 
his own voice. 1 This instinct enabled him to antici- 
pate the long-contested verdict of the Wagnerian music- 
drama, so that even before that composer had obtained 
a sympathetic hearing in his native Germany, Paris 
had listened incredulously to the enthusiastic appre- 
ciation of this father of the Decadents. Baudelaire, 
however, did not interpret Wagner to his countrymen as 
marking a normal, though a long step in musical evo- 
lution. His attraction was for the eccentric aspects of 
that great composer's genius, which still remains to a 
degree unappreciated in France. 

Baudelaire's genius is unhealthy, and unfortunately 
disease is more contagious than health. The robust 
sentiment of Hugo finds but a faint echo on Parnas- 
sus, while from the putrescent hot-bed of the " Pleurs 
du mal" there has sprung a rank and pestiferous 
growth of poison plants that shed the winged seeds of 
literary disorganization and morbid psychology over 

1 His reading aloud of poetry seems to have produced a very deep 
impression on the finest minds of his generation, among them Stend- 
hal, Gautier, Hugo, Flaubert, Banville, Leconte de Lisle, and Dela- 
croix, to whom Baudelaire was most loyal in friendship and generous 
in critical appreciation. 



THE EVOLUTION OF LYRIC POETRY . 341 

the poetry of the next generation. These noxious 
germs were powerfully aided in their development by 
some foreign results of similar causes. The Eussian 
novelists, the English painters, the German composers 
have combined to undermine the power of the clear 
scientific spirit of Taine, and to cultivate in enervated 
minds the diathesis of indefinite mysticism that finds 
its present expression in the Symbolists. 

Determinist philosophy and analytical science, that 
for a time held high carnival and undisputed sway in 
French fiction, and obtained a more sober recognition 
in the drama, won foothold in the lyric poetry of the 
Parnassians only by compromise. And so it was nat- 
ural that the reaction against the positivist, scientific 
spirit should manifest itself here first and most 
strongly. Symbolism, stripped of its antic garb, is an 
effort to re-establish the place of metaphysical thought 
in poetry. It has been usually a misdirected effort; 
but though the attempt has failed, it has its eternal 
justification in the unsolvable mystery of nature. In- 
deed a certain symbolism is consistent with, or perhaps 
one should rather say, inherent in, complete natural- 
ism. For, as Brunetifere happily puts it, the Symbolists 
have no other origin than the profoundly human need 
of making abstractions cognizable by materializing 
them, and no other excuse for being than to manifest 
physically to all what is spiritually accessible only to 
few. Thus Symbolism becomes metaphysics mani- 
fested by images and made sensible to the heart. But 
one of the conditions of a true symbol is that it shall 
be clear, and that the work of the Symbolists obviously 
is not. Hence it is what this school indicates and 
what it promises rather than what it realizes, that 
gives interest to the somewhat incoherent utterances 



342 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

of these the most direct descendants in the poetic fam- 
ily of Baudelaire. For in times past these are the 
conditions that have preceded poetic revivals. 1 But 
if from this point of view all these vagrants of genius 
have their attraction, one only had the divine breath of 
which Horace speaks, and he was the greatest vagrant 
of them all, the discharged prisoner and social outcast, 
Paul Verlaine. 

The resemblance of this true poet to Baudelaire is 
less like to like than like in difference. It has indeed 
been said that Baudelaire invented a new shudder and 
Verlaine a new woe, but personally there is a closer 
parallel between Verlaine and Villon, for both were 
Bohemians by preference rather than by necessity, and 
both cultivated eccentricity in their lives and in their 
verses. This interest in form for its own sake allies 
Verlaine also to the Parnassians ; but from that com- 
pany his spirit, that brooked no rule, soon parted. 
Before the German war he had published three col- 
lections of verse ; then for eleven years he vanished 
from the surface of society, but reappeared in 1881 
with " Sagesse," after which he led a vagabond life 
between workhouses, caf^s, and hospices, publishing 
frequent volumes of verse and occasional articles in 
the critical reviews until his death, in January, 1896. 2 

The first verses of Verlaine suggest the somewhat 

1 Brunetiere, Poesie lyrique, ii. 229, and Litterature contem- 
poraine, 155. 

2 The chronology of the chief volumes of Verlaine is: Poemes 
saturnines, 1867; La Fete galante, 1868; La Bonne chanson, 1870; 
Sagesse, 1881; Jadis et naguere, 1883; Parallelement, 1885; Mes 
hopitaux, 1891. A convenient anthology of his poetry is contained in 
Choix de poesies de Paul Verlaine (Charpentier, 1892). 

Criticism : Lemaitre, Contemporains, iv. 60 ; Brunetiere, ii. 243 ; 
Fortnightly Review, March, 1891 (Delille). 



THE EVOLUTION OF LYRIC POETRY. 343 

earlier poems of Baudelaire and Leconte de Lisle, and 
betray also the influence of Edgar Poe. Already in 
" La Fete galante " one finds traces of that delight in 
phraseology, in the concord of sweet sounds, that grew 
on him through each succeeding volume, until far from 
" chiselling words like cups," as he said and supposed, 
he came to rely more and more for his effects on 
sonorousness, sentiment, and a mysterious obscurity 
that resists exact analysis and quite defies translation, 
which may indeed indicate the mental state of the 
writer but can give no idea of his instinct for melody. 
To take but a single instance from his first collection, 
the " Pofemes saturnines." One need only read aloud 
this "Chanson d'automne " to feel its exquisite melody : 

Les sanglots longs 
Des violons 

De l'automne 
Blessent mon cceur 
D'une langueur 

Monotone. 

Tout suffocant 
Et bleme, quand 

Sonne l'heure, 
Je me souviens 
Des jours anciens 

Et je pleurs. 

Et je m'en vais 
Au vent mauvais 

Qui m'emporte 
Dega dela, 
Pareil a la 

Feuille morte. 

But if we translate this, we shall see how far 
its charm is independent of its thought. Take away 



344 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

timbre and rhyme and there is not much reason left 
in " The long sobs of the violins of autumn wound 
my heart with a monotonous languor. Suffocating and 
pale when sounds the hour, I remember ancient days 
and I weep, and I am borne along on the cruel wind 
that carries me hither and thither like a dead leaf." 
So too this picture of Paris is exquisite to the ear but 
mere midsummer madness to the logical mind : — 

La lune plaquait ses teintes de zinc 

Par angles obtus ; 
Des bouts de fumee en forme de cinq 
Sortaient drus et noirs des hauts toits pointus. 



Moi j'allais re van t du divin Platon 

Et de Phidias 
Et de Salamine et de Marathon 
Sous Poeil clignotant des bleus bees de gaz. 

Who ever noticed as he walked at night in a Paris 
street the shape of the smoke wreaths from the then 
probably invisible chimney-pots ? Who ever noticed 
bright moonlight shadows on a flaringly lighted city 
sidewalk ? And why, finally, should Verlaine or any- 
body else dream of Plato and Phidias and Salamis and 
Marathon on a crowded Parisian boulevard, unless in- 
deed he be a mental degenerate ? 

And yet the eye may grow impatient of images 
that it cannot see, and the mind of phantom thoughts 
that elude its grasp, but the man who has music in his 
soul will be won back ever again by the indefinable 
charm of this faun-like genius. There are, however, de- 
grees in his eccentricity, and he who is not to the 
manner born wdll find " La Fete galante " and " La 
Bonne chanson" the most accessible of Verlaine's 
volumes. It is true that these delicate little trifles 



THE EVOLUTION OF LYRIC POETRY. 345 

savor sometimes of that intertwining of sentiment and 
sensuousness that characterized the poetry of the 
eighteenth century, but they are full of the loveliness 
of a studied artificiality, much of the charm of which 
depends on the literary culture of the reader. To 
catch the grace of " L'Allde " or of " Columbine," one 
must know a little of Parny and much of Watteau, 
for the former poem is a Dresden shepherdess mfin de 
siecle alexandrines and the latter is her joyous com- 
panion in a song measure that might have charmed 
Banville himself. The love ditties of " La Bonne 
chanson " are simpler, and so have a more perennial 
attractiveness. Some of these little songs sing them- 
selves so to the heart that it seems a sort of lit- 
erary sacrilege to attempt to translate them into 
prose or limping verses. But does not this speak 
for itself? — 

La lime blanche 
Luit dans les bois ; 
De chaque branche 
Part une voix 
Sous la ramee . . • 
Oh bien aimee. 

L'etang reflete 

Profond miroir 

La silhouette 

Du saule noir 

Oil le vent pleure . . . 

Revons : c'est l'heure. 

Un vaste et tendre 
Apaisement 
Semble descendre 
Du firmament 
Que l'astre irise . . . 
C'est Theure exquise. 



346 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

The years that separated " La Bonne chanson " 
from " Sagesse " intensified both the strength and 
the weakness of Verlaine's character. The contradic- 
tions of his nature became even more startling than 
those of Baudelaire. Here the poet of "La Fete 
galante" and the future author of " ParalMement " 
proclaimed with agonized sincerity and the most 
intensely Catholic devotion that the Jesuits were the 
hope of social morals, and that Moses was the only 
scientist. Even the good old times when "Main- 
tenon cast on raptured France the shadow and the 
peace of her linen caps " are hardly orthodox enough 
for the convert's enthusiasm, and he prefers to those 
halcyon days of Gallicism the middle ages with " their 
high theology and firm morals " 1 In these verses his 
exalted faith holds converse with God and Christ as 
none since Thomas a Kempis has done, and hymns 
the glories of Mary in verses unsurpassed in French. 
Penitence has rarely reached a more intense lyric 
expression than in that series of sonnets where God 
and the sinner reason together in verses that have 
been called by a great modern critic " the first in 
French poetry that express truly the love of God." 
Yet these are equalled, and in a way excelled, by an 
exquisite hymn to the Virgin and other poems that 
reach the extreme intensity of self-renunciation. 2 But 

1 C'est vers le Moyen Age enorme et delicat, 
Qu'il faudrait que mon cceur en panne navigat. 



Haute theologie et solide morale 
Guide par la f olie unique de la Croix. 
(From " Non. II fut gallican," but compare " Sagesse d'un Louis 
Racine.") 

2 The sonnets begin " Mon Dieu m'a dit ; " the hymn to Mary, 
" Je ne veux plus aimer." Cp. also, " O mon Dieu, vous m'avez blesse 
d'amour." All these are in the " Choix de poesies," pp. 159-190. 



THE EVOLUTION OF LYKIC POETRY. 347 

even in Verlaine's^ " Sagesse " there are pieces as hard 
to set in order as a Chinese puzzle, 1 for Catholicism 
had not weaned him from the idolatry of words, and 
he was presently to show in his pitifully curious 
" Parallfelement " that it had not weaned him any 
more than the same Catholic aspirations had done 
Baudelaire, from an attempt to combine the worship 
of G-od with that of the flesh, in what is indeed a 
melancholy parallel. 

The poetry that follows "Sagesse" grows steadily 
more incoherent and uneven, so that it is impossible to 
speak of progress or retrogression from volume to vol- 
ume, while in each there are striking groups and single 
poems. Perhaps his strongest recent work was in 
political and social satire. In a ballad dedicated to 
Luise Michel he defined the Eepublican leaders as e 'per- 
verted talent, megatherium or bacillus, raw soldier, 
insolent shyster (robin), or some brittle compromise, 
giant of mud with feet of clay." 2 But if the govern- 
ment delights him not, neither does Paris, that "glaring 
pile of white stones, where the sun rages as in a con- 
quered country. All vices, the exquisite and the hide- 
ous, have their lair in this desert of white stones." 3 
Some of the realistic pictures of tavern and street in the 

1 E. g., " L'Espoir luit comme un brin de paille dans Tetable," 
which is ingeniously unravelled by Lemaitre, 1. c. 99. 
2 Gouvernements de maltalent, 
Megatherium ou bacille, 
Soldat brut, robin insolent, 
Ou quel que compromise fragile, 
Geant de boue aux pieds d'argile. 
8 La " grande ville." Un tas criard de pierres blanches 
Ou rage le soleil comme en pays conquis. 
Tous les vices ont leur taniere, les exquis 
Et les hideux, dans ce desert de pierres blanches. 



348 MODERN FEENCH LITERATURE. 

workmen's wards are gems in their way, though their 
brilliancy is more that of the cat's eye or the moonstone 
than that of the diamond or the emerald. Here is a 
single example among many : ] — 

The noise of the wineshop, the mud of the walk, 
Sickly trees shedding leaves in the dusky air, 
The omnibus, tempest of iron and mud, 
That creaks ill balanced between its four wheels 
And slowly rolls its eyes, red and green ; 
Workmen going to the club while they smoke 
Their cutty-pipes under the gendarmes' nose, 
Eoofs dripping, walls oozing, and pavement that slips, 
Broken asphalt and gutters overflowing the sewer, 
Behold my road — with paradise at the end. 

Then there are among these verses fantastic bits of 
diablerie that suggest opium dreams. There is a weird 
fascination in the high festival of the satans at Ecba- 
tana, where they " make litter of their five senses for 
the seven sins " and at last attempt " to maintain the 
balance in their duel with God by sacrificing hell to 
universal love." 2 Another of these "twilight pieces," 

1 Le bruit du cabaret, la fange du trottoir, 

Les plantanes dechus s'eff euillant dans Tair noir, 
I/omnibus, ouragan de ferailles et de boue, 
Qui grince mal assis entre ses quatre roues, 
Et roule ses yeux verts et rouges lentement ; 
Les ouvriers allant au club, tout en fumant 
Leur brule-gueule au nez des agents de police, 
Toits qui degoutent, murs suintants, pave qui glisse, 
Bitume defence, ruisseaux comblant Tegout ; 
Voila ma route — avec le paradis au bout. 

2 Font litiere aux sept peches de leurs cinq sens. 



En maintenant Pequilibre de ce duel, 
Par moi TEnfer dont e'est ici le repaire 
Se sacrifie a V Amour universel ! 



THE EVOLUTION OF LYRIC POETRY. 349 

as Verlaine grimly calls them, represents a countess 
in prison holding in her lap the head of her husband, 
whom she has killed in a fit of jealousy while he was 
in mortal sin. The head speaks to tell her that he 
loves her still, and gasps : " Damn thyself that we 
be not parted." " Pity, pity, my God ! " she shrieks, 
and by that prayer is torn from her lover to paradise, 
to discover, like another of these incarnations of pas- 
sion, that "hell is absence." 

Such conceptions are the sign of an unbalanced 
mind, of which many traces can be found in other 
poems whose rhythm has the capricious beauty of a 
hashish dream and, like our English "Kubla-Khan," 
defies the analysis of the rhetorician. An instance of 
this is afforded by his "Art po^tique," which has a 
double interest because it both illustrates and charac- 
terizes the aspirations of the decadent school, though 
they write their best poetry when they are recreant to 
it. It may not be without interest, therefore, to trans- 
late as well as may be the sense, or what seems to be 
the sense, of a few stanzas, laboring to be literal, though 
w T ith the certainty of remaining obscure : " Music be- 
fore everything; therefore choose the unequal, more 
vague, more soluble in air, with nothing in it that has 
weight or pose. Then, too, you must not go choose 
your words too cautiously. Nothing is dearer than 
the gray song, where the indefinite joins the pre- 
cise . . . For shade is still our desire, — not color, only 
shade. Oh, shade alone affiances dream to the dream, 
and flute to the 110™.'' l 

1 De la musique avant toute chose, 

Et, pour cela, prefere Flmpair 
Plus vague, plus soluble dans Fair, 
Sans rien en lui qui pese ou qui pose. 



350 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

What this last line may mean I cannot conjecture, 
nor perhaps Verlaine either, for a little later he adds 
this counsel: "Let thy verse be good luck scattered 
on the crisped wind of the morning that reeks of mint 
and thyme . . . And all the rest is literature." 2 
Which is merely Verlaine's recognition of the fact that 
to him words are more than ideas, style more than 
matter ; and though this is contrary to any true sym- 
bolism in poetry, it is true in a large measure of the 
verses of many decadents who have allowed them- 
selves to be called Symbolists though they were appro- 
priately described by Verlaine as " Cymbalists." 

It is not without significance that many of those who 
for a time attracted most attention in this group were for- 
eigners : Mor^as a Greek, Viel£-Griffin and Merrill Amer- 
icans, and the Belgian Maeterlinck who later won distinc- 
tion as a dramatist. Of Symbolists who were French by 
birth one need name only Ghil, Mallarm^, and De Ee- 
gnier, this last the most talented lyric poet of them all. 

These men undertook, or professed to undertake, to 
express essentially poetic sentiments indirectly by far- 
fetched metaphors, or even by the sound of words and 
letters. Thus Ghil tells us that " a is black, e white, 

II faut ainsi que tu n'ailles point 

Choisir tes mots sans qnelqne meprise : 
Kien de plus cher que la chanson grise 

Ou l'lndecis au Precis se joint. 



Car nous voulons la Nuance encor, 

Pas la Couleur, rien que la nuance ! 
Oh ! la nuance seu]e fiance 
Le reve au reve et la flute au cor. 
1 Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure 
Eparse au vent crispe du matin 
Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym . . 
Et tout le reste est litterature. 



THE EVOLUTION OF LYRIC POETRY. 351 

i blue, o red, and u yellow ; " while another theorist of 
onomatopoeia, Eimbaud, indignantly avers that any 
decadent ought to know that " i is red, o blue, and 10 
green." Not content with this, they have discovered a 
pre-established harmony between vowel sounds and 
musical instruments : " a is the organ, e the harp, i the 
violin, o the trumpet, and u the flute." Or, again, " a is 
monotony, e serenity, i passion and prayer, o glory, and 
u the ingenuous smile," though not because that is 
what might naturally end such an ars poetica, for the 
diphthongs have their significance also, and even combi- 
nations of vowel and consonant are not neglected in 
Eimbaud's Symbolist "Gradus ad Parnassum." 1 

Verlaine does not go to these extremes, nor do any 
but the mountebanks among the Symbolists follow 
this will-o'-the-wisp except to attract attention or show 
their virtuosity. But Verlaine. is always a poet of 
impulse or instinct, and is only just to himself when 
he asserts 2 that verse is to him a spontaneous expres- 
sion of feeling, conscious of no literary tradition and 
developing no consecutive thought. Hence comes his 
indifference to the consecrated literary usages of words. 
They have not the same meaning for him that they 
would have to a poet of literary training, and yet his 
ear delights in them. As Lemaitre suggests, it is 
as though he had entered the Parnassian Cenacle, had 
listened to those tuneful disciples of art for art, and 
then had left their company " intoxicated by the music 
of their words, but by their music alone." The same 
writer concludes his delicate, sympathetic, yet search- 
ing diagnosis of this morbid spirit with the antitheti- 

1 Cp. Rimbaud, Traite du verbe, and Brunetiere, Poesie lyrique, 
ii. 243. 

2 Cp. Huret, L'Enquete litteraire. 



352 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

cally balanced judgment : " Verlaine has the senses of 
a sick man, but the soul of a child ; he has a naive 
charm in his unhealthy languor ; he is a decadent who 
has in him most of the primitive man." 

Like Baudelaire and like Banville, Verlaine and 
the decadents more or less closely related to him suffer 
from a morbid singularity, the overstimulation of indi- 
vidualism inherited from the bankruptcy of Komanti- 
cism. Hence the line of their development would 
naturally be lyric poetry. But to those who are anx- 
iously watching the signs in the literary heavens there 
seems small promise in this school of any permanent 
advance in the art or mechanism of song. They stand 
for reaction from the coldly formal objectivity of the 
Parnassians, and their value to the next generation 
will probably seem to be that they reasserted the 
rightful place in lyric poetry of individuality and 
idealism. For this they will be remembered, while 
their licenses in language and rhythm will sooner be 
forgotten than forgiven. 

Mention may be made also of the patriotic lyrics of 
Paul D&oul&de, who by his Chants du soldat (1872), 
the Nouveaux chants (1875), and Les Marches et son- 
neries (1881), revived the martial ardor of France after 
the disasters of the Terrible Year. Among the younger 
poets of promise may be named Fernand Gregh and 
Andr£ Eivoire, who represent, each in his way, an effort 
to conciliate French poetic tradition with the modern 
spirit, avoiding alike the aloofness of the Parnassians 
and the vagaries of the Symbolists. 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE DRAMA. 353 



CHAPTEE X. 

THE EVOLUTION OF THE DRAMA. 1 

The drama of modern France is not a development 
of the Eomantic movement, still less a reversion to 
the classical type as it was understood by Ponsard and 
his School of Good Sense. It owes much to Diderot 
and the dramatic reformers of the eighteenth century, 
and more than it is always willing to confess, to 
Scribe, who, while the psychological comedy of social 
satire was awaiting its development, transfigured the 
humble vaudeville into the legitimate drama. During 
the generation that separates the first from the third 
Napoleon Scribe was without a rival in popular favor, 
and the fertility and rapidity of his production seemed 
to leave no demand unsatisfied. 2 Perhaps no other 
playwright has ever enjoyed so long an undisputed 
pre-eminence or reaped such rich rewards. But the 
cause of his success is also the cause of the shade of 
mocking contempt with which it is now the literary 

1 For the statistics of the modern stage Soubies, La Comedie-Fran- 
caise depuis Fepoque romantique, 1824-1895, is invaluable. All the 
dramatists named in this chapter and many others are discussed in 
Lemaitre, Impressions de theatre, 10 vols. 

2 Scribe was born in 1791, and died in 1861. Some four hundred of 
his pieces have been collected in seventy-six volumes. For critical 
appreciations see Lanson. p. 966 ; Brunetiere, Epoques du theatre, 
p. 349 ; Sainte-Beuve, Portraits contemporains, ii. 91 and 589; Weiss, 
Le theatre et les moeurs, p. 3. 

23 



354 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

fashion to dismiss him. It must be admitted that 
Scribe never seeks to rise above the philistine realism 
of his audience. There is a smug worldliness about 
the plays as there was about the man. Virtue with 
him must always be rewarded in current coin, a dot 
is the highest adornment of beauty, to get on in the 
world is the chief end of the human race. There 
is a frankly naive confession of the dramatist's phi- 
losophy of life in the inscription on his palatial house 
at Sdrincourt, which one may render thus : — 

The stage has procured this retreat for the poet. 
Passer, my thanks, for to you I may owe it. 

He had no higher ambition than to give the public 
what it wanted, and as much as it would take at his 
price. 

Yet Scribe plays an important part in the evolution 
of the drama, for he understood the art of the play- 
wright as hardly another has done. Each incident 
that came to his notice took a dramatic form in his 
mind. Just as a slight shock will induce some satu- 
rated solution to a crystallization that is almost instan- 
taneous, so the least hint sufficed to set a new dramatic 
situation in the kaleidoscope of Scribe's mind. Legouvd 
tells us that he turned the mediocre five-act tragedy of 
" La Chanoinesse " into a lively one-act farce while the 
author was reading it to him. He would remodel on 
the spot a play whose rehearsal show T ed a lack of tell- 
ing effects. A mere hint sufficed him, and the joint 
authorship so frequently noted on the titlepages of 
his plays often amounted to no more than that. More 
than one writer was astonished to receive a share of 
fame and profit for work in which he could not recog- 
nize his paternity. But Scribe was as particular in 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE DRAMA. 355 

this regard as Dumas had been careless. He looked 
at the matter as an honorable dramatic craftsman, the 
artisan of art for profit rather than the artist of art for 
truth, and so he made friends of all his rivals. 

His supremacy lay, as Vitet says, in " the gift of 
discovering at every step, almost with no occasion, 
theatrical combinations of new and striking effect." 
The spectator feels the fascination and the succeeding 
mental vacancy of a juggling exhibition, that leaves in 
his mind, as Dumas fils has put it in one of his dog- 
matic prefaces, " neither an idea, nor a reflection, nor 
an enthusiasm, nor a hope, nor a remorse, nor disgust, 
nor ease. You have looked, listened, been puzzled, 
laughed, wept, passed the evening, been amused. This 
is much, but you have learned nothing." 

Such technical skill as this is no title to literary 
fame. Scribe made his first shrewd appeal to the 
public ear by flattering the moneyed aristocracy of the 
Eestoration while he soothed the wounded pride of 
his country by delicate allusions to the glories of the 
Empire. His best work was done after the Eevolu- 
tion of 1830 had given alike freedom and occasion 
for mild political persiflage that has indeed hardly 
a trace of the strength or seriousness of satire. 1 A 
standing resort in these plays is to contrast the new 
democratic with the old aristocratic spirit, a dramatic 
conflict that has now almost wholly yielded to the 
frank recognition of democracy in the drama of modern 
society. 2 Scribe, then, was in no way a reformer or 

1 For instance: Bertrand et Raton, 1833; La Camaraderie, 1837; 
Le Verre d'eau, 1840: Une Chaine, 1841; Adrienne Lecouvreur, 
1849; Bataille de dames, 1851. 

2 One may find it still in Ohnet's Maitre des forges, and in San- 
deau's Mademoiselle de la Seigliere. 



356 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

even an originator. He was too much of a mate- 
rialist and philistine to have any close affiliation with 
the idealism of the Eomanticists, the playful poetry 
of De Musset, or the unbridled fancy of Dumas. It 
was a degraded form of drama into which he expanded 
the vaudeville. His local color is careless, his delinea- 
tion of character is weak ; and yet he was a necessary 
factor in the dramatic development ; for the realistic 
satirists of the next generation, who took their spirit 
from Balzac, learned from Scribe, and could have 
learned from him alone, that mastery of the art and rou- 
tine of theatrical presentation which has given France 
its unquestioned leadership in the drama. 

This supremacy has been won by few, — by Augier, 
Dumas fils, Sardou ; it has been maintained by many 
excellent playwrights, among whom Feuillet, Pailleron, 
Labiche, and Eostand have shown marked individuality. 
The new note was first struck and nobly maintained 
by Emile Augier, whose best work the public voice 
already recognizes as classic and worthy to endure. 
He it was who, when comedy was in danger of being 
stifled between Scribe's pretentious vaudeville and the 
equally pretentious Eomantic sensational drama, re- 
stored it, with the help of Dumas fils, to a life more 
vigorous and more moral, more realistic, more truly 
contemporary, than French literature had known since 
the time of Moliere, 1 reflecting in this the powerful 
influence of the novels of Balzac, that unfortunately 
did not make itself felt till their author was beyond 
the consolations of appreciation. 

Augier' s work, however, is not homogeneous, and must 
therefore be considered chronologically. He had been 
trained in Paris for the law, and in this profession he 

1 Cp. Lanson, p. 1041 sqq. 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE DRAMA. 357 

began his career. 1 But he had inherited from his 
mother, the daughter of the prolific novelist and dram- 
atist Pigault-Lebrun, a bent for literature, so that the 
law seemed to him a triste hamais, as he says in " La 
Jeunesse," impeding the flight of his genius. He stole 
time from his profession to write " Charles VII. in 
Naples," a drama on the already unfashionable Eo- 
mantic lines, that found no favor with managers and 
probably deserved none. He was undiscouraged by 
this check, however ; and his second piece, " La Cigue " 
showed the result of the collapse of Hugo's "Bur- 
graves" in the preceding year, by its dignified self- 
restraint, though it still lacked realistic strength. 
Ponsard now saw in Augier a welcome recruit to the 
School of Good Sense, and as amended by his practised 
hand " La Cigue " achieved a success that decided the 
dramatist's career. 

This classical play, in regular but somewhat pedes- 
trian verse, is full of grace and playful wit, but, as 
the title implies, Greek in scene, and with very little 
trace of the peculiar mint-stamp that marks Augier's 
later work ; while a second classical play, " Le Joueur 

1 Born 1820, died 1889. Theatre (7 vols.). Dates of production 
of the principal plays: La Cigue, 1844; Un Homme de bien, 1845; 
L'Aventuriere, 1848 ; Gabrielle, 1849 ; Le Joueur de flute, 1850 ; Diane, 
1852; La Pierre de touche, 1853; Philiberte, 1853; Le Mariage 
d'Olympe, 1855 ; Le Gendre deM, Poirier, 1855 ; Ceinture Doree, 1855 ; 
La Jeunesse, 1858; Les Lionnes pauvres, 1858; Un Beau mariage, 
1859 ; Les Effrontes, 1861 ; Le Fils de Giboyer, 1862; Maitre Guerin, 
1864; La Contagion, 1866 ; Paul Porestier, 1868; Lions et renards, 
1869 ; Le Postscriptum, 1869 ; Jean de Thommeray, 1873 ; Maden 
selle Caverlet, 1876; Les Fourchambault, 1878. 

Critical essays : Parigot, Emile Augier (Classiques populaires) ; 
Lacour, Trois theatres ( Augier, Dumas, Sardou ) ; Matthews, French 
Dramatists ; Sarrazin, Moderne Drama der Franzosen ; Doumic, 
Portraits d'ecrivains, 57. 



358 MODEEN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

de flute," that may well date from this time though it 
was not acted till much later, takes up the parable of 
" Marion de Lorme " and directly contradicts the fun- 
damental thesis of his greater dramas. This contra- 
diction is repeated in " L/Aventuriere," the tale of 
another frail but rehabilitated heroine, who in her 
striving for a place among the femmes serieuses di- 
vides at least the sympathy of the hearers, — a sym- 
pathy that when his eyes were opened by Dumas' 
" Dame aux cam^lias," Augier became most zealous to 
deny. Still, the attentive reader might have discov- 
ered passages even here that indicated his coming 
vocation as the defender of the integrity of the family, 
which is the main thesis of his second manner ; and to 
emphasize these he rewrote the play in 1860. That 
he was still feeling his way to the proper field for the 
exercise of his dramatic talent is suggested by " L'Habit 
vert," a witty trifle in which De Musset had a share. 
But his genius was too serious to succeed in this genre, 
and if he recurred to it twenty years later in " Le Post- 
scriptum," it was only to register a second failure. 

The reaction from Eomantic idealism is first strongly 
marked in " Gabrielle," though in this " domestic 
drama " there is enough idealization left to make the 
poetic form appropriate. Indeed, " Gabrielle " is al- 
most a hymn to the fireside, and reveals Augier to us 
as a social moralist, the champion, as a rather ill- 
natured critic put it, of "the average and conventional 
ethics, that knows how to ally the calculation of inter- 
est to the language of sentiment," which, taking the 
world as it goes, is not such a very bad thing. At 
any rate, it was precisely what the Eomanticists had 
never known how to do. They might and did mock 
the bourgeois sentiment of the closing line of " Ga- 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE DRAMA. 359 

brielle " : "0 pkre de famille ! pokte, je t'aime;" 
but the Academy consoled him with the Monthyon 
prize. The wit of " Gabrielle " was undeniable, and 
one sees first in it a promise of the serious, forceful 
purpose that marks his masterpieces. Yet the next 
steps were hesitating. In " Diane " he seemed to re- 
vert for a moment to Eomantic methods in an histori- 
cal drama that shows the last traces of the virus of 
"Marion de Lorme." Then in " Philiberte " he tried 
his hand at the preciosite of the eighteenth century, 
guarding the unities with a stringency that might 
warm the heart of Boileau, but showing a noteworthy 
advance in technical skill and a still greater develop- 
ment of his psychological insight in the affectionate 
care with which he unfolds the character of his girl- 
heroine. 

Augier now began to work in collaboration with the 
novelist Jules Sandeau, 1 whose gentler humor may 
have softened somewhat the growing sternness of the 
social satirist. Directly these plays, " La Pierre de 
touche " and " Le Gendre de M. Poirier," probably 
owed little to Sandeau ; but they mark the cardinal 
point in Augier's dramatic career. From this time he 
almost wholly abandoned verse, and his fame would 
lose nothing if he had abandoned it entirely. This 
change from the School of Good Sense to the good 
sense of no school involved or induced an equal change 
in the character of the dramas, which became more 
virile and realistic. Augier had still many steps to 
take, but he took none so vital as that which separates 

1 Born 1811; died 1882. His best novels, "Mademoiselle de la 
Seigliere," " La Chasse au roman," " Sacs et parchemins," " La Maison 
de Penarvan," and several more, were dramatized with the aid of 
Augier and others. 



360 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

" Philiberte " from " Le Gendre de M. Poirier." On 
the other hand, " La Pierre de touche " is interesting 
chiefly as a sort of " touchstone " by which to test the 
contribution of Sandeau to the evolution of the greater 
dramatist's genius. His " L'Hdritage " furnishes the 
situation, which is the opposition of the genuine artist 
to the pretender. The subject is not essentially dra- 
matic, and only a strong analysis of character could 
save the play from sinking to the commonplace. This 
Augier could not yet give, and his lavish wit did not 
save the situation. In " Le Gendre de M. Poirier," 
however, he took only the fundamental idea from 
Sandeau, and without direct collaboration worked 
under the immediate inspiration of Molikre's " Bour- 
geois gentilhomme " and " George Dandin." 

" Le Gendre de M. Poirier " has been called " the 
finest French comedy since the ' Mariage de Figaro/ " 
and it is generally regarded by the dramatic critics of 
France as the model of their comedy of manners. It 
is indeed an " honest, healthy, and hardy " satire on 
the plutocracy which under the bourgeois king Louis 
Philippe had at last won the social prominence that it 
had claimed since the days of Le Sage's " Turcaret." 
M. Poirier is a retired cloth-merchant, a millionaire, 
whose ambition is the peerage. With him is con- 
trasted Gaston, a bankrupt nobleman, to whom the 
ambitious Poirier has given his daughter Antoinette, 
while nobler phases of the aristocracy and of commer- 
cial life are presented in the Duke and Verdelet. 
These five clearly marked types are the only impor- 
tant characters, a dramatic economy in striking con- 
trast to the former excess of Scribe and the later 
superfluity of Sardou. It is in these characters, not 
in the plot, that the comic force of the play rests. 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE DRAMA. 361 

Almost every speech of Poirier throws new light on a 
nature true to life in all its many-sidedness, and the 
touch of the artist is not less kindly than keen, while 
the most sparkling humor scintillates through all. 
These men, like all of Augier's greater creations, are 
complex, made up of nobler and baser elements, so that 
the study of them is a lesson in charity. Gaston is no 
idealized hero of romance. His mocking blague in the 
earlier acts accompanies conduct neither righteous nor 
noble, but the good in him wins sympathy from the 
first. So the contrast between the virtues of the Duke 
and of Verdelet sheds a kindly light on the limitations 
of each. Antoinette, in whose bourgeois soul trial 
develops the dignity of true nobility, may be artisti- 
cally less great, but she is always charming ; and so 
this comedy realizes the old maxim, castigat ridendo, 
and there is nothing bitter in the laughter it evokes. 1 

That bitterness came, however, when Augier at- 
tacked vices more corroding than aristocratic vanity 
and bourgeois ambition. " Ceinture dor^e " shows 
how a woman's wealth may be a barrier to her domes- 
tic happiness, especially in France, where, more than 
elsewhere, marriage for money is an obvious butt for 
satire. " How unlucky," says his heroine, " for a 
statue to be of gold and not of marble ! How unfor- 
tunate when the material is more prized than the 
workmanship, when one marries a woman for her 
dowry without so much question of her character as 
one would make in engaging a domestic ! I am proud, 
and I will not be taken at hap-hazard." Yet the mar- 
riage of her choice is denied her till the wheel of for- 
tune has deprived her father of his tainted wealth. 

1 A fuller analysis of this comedy may be found in my own edition 
of it, Boston, 1896 (Heath). 



362 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

This drama of the stock-exchange has a peculiar 
interest, for it prefigures hi 1855 those social satires 
that begin six years later with " Les Effrontds," though 
Augier was still willing to accept final conversions, 
and had not risen to the sterner realism of Vernouillet 
and Gudrin. A step toward this truer ethical position 
is marked by " Le Mariage d'Olympe," a tragedy of the 
marriage of a social interloper with a man of noble 
blood and plebeian instincts, in which the dramatist 
does frank penance for his " Joueur de flute." Here he 
takes up the gauntlet of " Marion de Lorme " and " La 
Dame aux camelias," and shows the social peril that 
lies in the rehabilitation of the courtesan. For the 
morbid sentiment of Eomantic sympathy, he substi- 
tuted a healthy common-sense ; he replaced their " vir- 
ginity of the soul" with his "homesickness for the 
gutter," and with keen analysis and admirable illustra- 
tion, he pointed a course that Dumas had somewhat 
feebly indicated two years before in " Diane de Lys." 
This play was an immense advance over " Gabrielle " in 
vital power ; and the Academy, that had accorded the 
former the rather doubtful honor of a " virtue prize," 
welcomed to their number, in 1858, the author of " Le 
Mariage d'Olympe," which indeed did more than any 
other one thing to banish sentimental sympathy for 
this form of vice from the French stage for the rest of 
the century. 

His next play, " La Jeunesse," showed more versa- 
tility than discretion, being a somewhat sentimental 
threnody on the disadvantages of youth, that " used to 
be force, dominion, but now is feebleness, obstacle, 
exclusion," so that even ardent passion barely rescues 
men from the fatal mariage de convenance. The whole 
is insignificant, and its chief interest lies in the allu- 



THE EVOLUTION OF THfc DRAMA. 363 

sions to the overcrowding of the learned professions, 
for they show that the dangers of a literary proletariat 
were felt in France even before 1860. A much 
stronger echo of the " Ceinture doree," however, could 
be heard in " Beau manage/' which also reflects the 
scientific interests of the epoch, though it lacks the 
psychological continuity and delicate characterization 
of " Poirier ; " but already " Les Lionnes pauvres " had 
shown a far riper and firmer art, and must rank w T ith 
" Poirier " as the best of the " domestic dramas." 

This play, whose title we may render " Poor Ladies 
of Fashion/' had been originally called " Les Femmes 
du monde entretenues." But the censors of the Second 
Empire objected to the name, perhaps because they 
were so tolerant of the thing. It is a fearless, and in 
no small degree successful, effort to paint the effect of 
the restless reaching out for material gratification that 
characterized the middle class of Paris, and indeed of 
the Continent generally, in the heyday of the Third 
Napoleon. But the play was too bold, and touched too 
many sensitive spots in the public of the Parisian 
theatre, to permit it to gain immediate popularity. It 
was the first drama of its kind, and the close aroused a 
too painful tragic fear. Nor has it ever been frequently 
acted, though always highly esteemed, for similar plays 
soon learned from it an art that made it seem less 
realistic than they. It contains, however, Augier's 
greatest female character, Seraphine, " cold, cowardly, 
and perversely selfish," the counterpart and prototype 
of Daudet's Sidonie, 1 both in her character and her 
fate, as she sinks from the limbo of the lionnes 
pauvres to the inferno of insolent corruption. Thus 
Augier rejects the conventional deus ex machina to 

1 Fromont jeune et Risler aine. 



364 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

punish vice and reward virtue. The censors had de- 
manded that he should show Seraphine scourged with 
small-pox, a device afterward attempted by Zola in 
"Nana;" but the vision that he opens to us of the 
inevitable future of the newly launched cascadeuse 
inspires a truer and deeper dread of destiny. 

The longing for wealth without effort, for unearned 
enjoyment, is not new, but it is most seen in mate- 
rialistic epochs such as that of the Second Empire, 
and its manifestations are as clear and as dangerous in 
society as in the family. So the dramatist is naturally 
led from " Les Lionnes pauvres " to " Les Effront^s," 
the unprincipled speculators, developed in another 
sphere by the same social virus that produced Sera- 
phine. Skilfully adapting to his purpose the then 
recent scandal of the banker De Mires, Augier made 
his Vernouillet a type of the schemer who grazes, and 
occasionally oversteps the verge of legality while re- 
taining the toleration of a lax society. The Figaro of 
the eighteenth century has risen many grades in the 
social sphere, thanks to democracy and materialism. 
He has become less sentimental, he is incapable of an 
unselfish love, he sacrifices self-respect to blague. And 
by the side of this social flower Augier places the 
Marquis d'Auberive, who sees in Vernouillet the most 
dangerous nightshade blossom of modern democracy, 
and cynically aids him, "amusing himself by foment- 
ing the corruption of the bourgeoisie." 

To advance his schemes and avenge his spites, the 
social adventurer can find no better means than to own 
a newspaper, on whose staff he employs the "revolver- 
journalist " Giboyer, a typical literary pretorian, whose 
biting pen is for sale to the highest bidder of whatever 
party, who must live by his wits since these have been 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE DRAMA. 365 

educated at the expense of his conscience ; a man who 
" would scourge his own father with epigrams for a 
modest remuneration," the fit tool of the aristocratic 
pessimist and of the democrat educated to tastes that 
he cannot satisfy. But the plot of this triple alliance 
for the degradation of society is wholly subordinate to 
the development of these characteristic products of our 
modern democracy. 

" Les Effrontes " aroused interest and excited com- 
ment, but the " Fils de Giboyer " soon stirred a far 
more acrimonious opposition by its plain though 
masked allusions to that valiant knight of the pen 
Louis Veuillot. 1 Here the press as an engine of black- 
mail and corruption is still the theme, but the satire is 
directed largely against the successful men of business 
whom capital has turned into timid conservatives, tools 
of the abler nobility and of their-unscrupulous clerical 
allies. The interest centres in this triangular struggle 
between a decaying aristocracy, a vain commercial plu- 
tocracy, and an increasing body of men who are deter- 
mined or compelled to live by their wits. In a series 
of vivid scenes, the Parisian sees the conflict of his 
modern society revealed to him with sparkling wit 
and unfailing dramatic interest, that are likely to make 
this drama one of the most enduring of its time. 

Less sensational but as earnest and profound is 
" Maitre Gudrin " whose central figure, a country law- 
yer, is pronounced by French criticism to be " perhaps 
the most original and clear-cut character that our 
comedy has given us since Molifere." Unfortunately 
the presentation of Gu^rin's wife and son shows regret- 

1 A certain De Mirecourt saw fit to identify himself with Giboyer's 
son, and answered in a scurrilous volume, " Le Petit-fils de Pigault- 
Lebrun." 



366 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

table concessions to the sentimental and melodramatic 
tricks of Scribe. The Deroncerets, father and daughter, 
victims of his chicane, are obviously inspired by an af- 
fectionate study of Balzac's "Kecherche de rabsolu." 
But when the lawyer has tricked the old man out of 
the last remnant of his property, salving his conscience 
by strict adherence to the letter of the law, he is as 
puzzled as Poirier to find the success of his schemes 
thwarted by the moral revolt of his wife and son. 
Yet, though puzzled, he is not repentant. For the 
Gudrins and the Vernouillets of society, men having 
their consciences seared with a hot iron, Augier seems 
to say there is no repentance. 

Except for the single character of Gu^rin, this play 
marks a retrogression that was accentuated by " Paul 
Forestier," whose character seems too weak to justify 
the sacrifice by which his wife wins back his affection. 
Augier was never to surpass u Giboyer," but it was in 
this kind that he was still to do his best work ; and in 
creating the D'Estrigaud of " La Contagion " and " Lions 
et renards " he drew a character not unworthy to stand 
beside the four pillars of his fame, Poirier, Seraphine, 
Vernouillet, and Giboyer. 

The " contagion " of modern society is the desire of 
wealth without work, — a spirit that, as Augier shows, 
saps all idealism, public patriotism, and private honor. 
It is the spirit of blague, already reproved in " Poirier," 
— a spirit before which nothing is sacred, — the 
Mephistophelian spirit that enamels our overstrained 
consciences with its skeptical Pyrrhonism, mocks at 
duty and virtue, and answers every noble aspiration 
with a sneer. This blague, that infects even generous 
souls, is personified here in the stock -gambler D'Estri- 
gaud, who defeats himself at last because healthy com- 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE DRAMA. 367 

mon-sense morality revolts at the logical results of his 
social and ethical system. " You have gangrened my 
honor," says Andrd, " but your sting can be cured, like 
others, with cautery. Farewell, gentlemen. You may 
make litter of all that we respect, — conscience, duty, 
family ; but the day will come when these outraged 
truths will reassert themselves in thunder." He re- 
coils from the abyss of moral degradation, and even 
the demi-mondaine Navarette holds herself too good 
to marry the discredited blagueur. But Andr£ has 
scotched the snake, not killed it; and D'Estrigaud reap- 
pears in " Lions et renards " as the rival of a disguised 
Jesuit in pursuit of the wealth of an heiress. This 
play has several scenes of delicious humor for the like 
of which we must go back to " Poirier." At last the 
blagueur is so impressed with his adversary's deft un- 
scrupulousness that he pays him the homage of imita- 
tion and turns Jesuit himself, thus pointing the author's 
anti-clerical moral. 

This moral the Franco-German War soon enforced 
with terrible emphasis. Outraged truth did indeed 
"reassert itself in thunder." And after Sardou had 
voiced his feelings in " Le Eoi Carotte," an opera-bouffe 
of more than wonted vacuity, after Dumas fils had 
offered the public the unsavory diet of his " Visite de 
noces," the serious Augier presented in " Jean de Thom- 
meray " a patriotic sequel to " La Contagion," inter- 
esting for its attempt to identify the integrity of the 
family with that of the state, though unfortunately 
one of the least inspired of his later dramas. Indeed, 
Augier had now reached what economists would call 
the " stationary state." " Madame Caverlet " and " Les 
Fourchambault " are pieces that bear the stamp 
of the master, but they do not rise to the height of 



368 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE, 

Giboyer and D'Estrigaud nor to the serener air of 
Poirier. The former deals with divorce, and doubtless 
contributed its quota to the legislative changes that 
were soon to follow. 1 It has an extraordinary vigor 
of dialogue, and some of the scenes are of the greatest 
power, but the public was probably right in thinking 
that it lacked interest as a whole. " Les Fourcham- 
bault " deserved and gained more favor. Indeed, the 
piece is among the most compactly constructed and 
vigorously executed of all Augier's dramas. He here 
trenches on the special preserve of Dumas, and places 
in the foremost rank an illegitimate son, whom he uses 
to contrast the strength of character that comes from 
the necessity of winning one's way with the effemi- 
nating influences of assured ease and luxury. The chief 
blot on the play is the melodramatic sentiment of the 
close. It marks in 1878 the reaction, that we shall 
trace presently in the novel, from thoroughgoing Nat- 
uralism, which might then have seemed at its height, 
though, from our present position, we can see that it 
was already showing signs of approaching decline. 

If we regard Augier's work as a whole, his early 
verses will show a plastic ease and daring use of meta- 
phor that recall the traditions of Eomanticism, and 
reappear in his later prose in vigorous turns and in 
strong and startling comparisons. He does not shrink 
from the slang of the boulevard or the boudoir when 
it suits his purpose ; and if he is less profuse and more 
methodical in his resort to these neologisms than 
Dumas, yet quite a full nosegay of them may be 
gathered even by the reader who skims the conversa- 
tion of Giboyer and D'Estrigaud. But no contem- 

1 For a resume" of the divorce legislation of France, see Report of 
the U. S. Commissioner of Labor, 1889, pp. 1004-1007. 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE DRAMA. 369 

porary dramatist has a sterner or loftier conception of 
his vocation than Augier. He is convinced that " the 
drama is the most active if not the most nutritive part 
of literature," and keeps ever before his eyes the edu- 
cation of his public. He sacrifices nothing to show 
with Sardou, nor to declamation with Dumas. This 
very earnestness makes him sometimes hard and bit- 
ter, for, as he makes Andrd say in "La Contagion," 
" some bites must be cured with cautery ; " but beside 
his D'Estrigaud and Vernouillet, beside Maitre Gu^rin 
and Giboyer, beside Sdraphine and Olympe, there are 
men and women full of noble hopefulness and aspira- 
tion, whose masculine virtue and feminine dignity 
seem more admirable and less commonplace than 
these homely qualities appear in the hands of any 
other modern dramatist. And, as has been said, even 
his reprobation is mingled with pity. Vice with him 
is almost always the distortion of virtue. He has a 
peculiarly catholic, broad-minded vision that gives a 
pathos to the limitations of a Poirier or a Pommeau, 
that sees the world neither en rose nor en gris, but 
with the honest sympathy of a true student of nature. 
Upright and downright, he leaves on the mind the 
impression of serious humor and keen irony that 
compel respect, together with robust loyalty and sound 
honesty that inspire trust. 

Next to Augier in critical esteem if not in popular 
favor stood the son of Alexandre Dumas ; but a 
greater contrast than that between the authors of 
"Monte Oristo" and of the " Demi-monde" it might 
be hard to find in the history of literature. The 
father's unscrupulous, rich, romantic fancy gave place 
to the close observation and realistic earnestness of the 
son. But the whole family history had been full of 

24 



370 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

contradictions, epigrammatically summed up in the 
words of Anatole France i 1 "A poor n egress, thrown 
into the arms of a colonist at St. Domingo, conceives 
a hero, who begets in his turn a colossus, whose son 
educated in the theatres of Paris stirs consciences there 
with exemplary rudeness and unheard-of audacity/ ' 

This unbending moralist 2 was a natural son, and 
has drawn in " L' Affaire Cldmenceau " a moving pic- 
ture of the torments caused by this origin during his 
school life. His father had indeed recognized him, 
and, school days over, the boy became immediately 
the companion and associate of this still youthful 
high-liver, who was then in the zenith of his pros- 
perity. The son naturally followed the father's ex- 
ample, and in 1848 found himself some 50,000 francs 
in debt. It was a rude awakening, but with prompt de- 
cision he took leave of his old associates and sold his 
experience to the world in " La Dame aux camelias." 
From that day he became a serious, hard-working 
author, first to pay his debts, then to gratify a legiti- 
mate ambition, and to have his say on the questions 
of the day. But his early novels, with the single ex- 

1 La Vie litteraire, i. 29. 

2 Born 1824 ; died 1895. Theatre complet (7 vols.). Dates of princi- 
pal pieces: Dame anx camelias, 1852; Diane de Lys, 1853; Demi- 
monde, 1855; Question d'argent, 1857; Fils naturel, 1858; Pere 
prodigue, 1859; Ami des femmes, 1864; Idees de Mme. Aubray, 
1867; Visite de noces, 1871; Princesse Georges, 1871; Femme de 
Claude, 1873; M. Alphonse, 1873; L'Etrangere, 1876 ; Princesse de 
Bagdad, 1881; Denise, 1885; Francillon, 1887. Novels: Dame aux 
camelias, 1848; I/Affaire Clemenceau, 1867, and many others. Plays 
revised by Dumas are collected in Theatre des autres (1894). He had a 
share in " Supplice d'une femme" (1865) and " Danicheffs (1876); 
and his own " Clemenceau " was dramatized by D'Artois in 1887. 

Criticism : Bourget, Essais de psychologie contemporaine ; Lacour, 
Trois theatres ; Matthews, French Dramatists ; Sarrazin, Das mo- 
derne Drama der Franzosen ; Doumic, Portraits d'ecrivains. 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE DKAMA. 371 

ception of this realistic study of the life and death of 
the consumptive courtesan Alphonsine Plessis, have 
little value for the study of his literary development. 
Like his first dramatic attempt, 1 these tales are es- 
sentially Eomantic, a natural reflection of the manner 
of the elder Dumas. 

Lack of money produced the "Dame aux camelias," 
and four years later the same powerful motive led 
Dumas to his true vocation by inducing him to drama- 
tize it, a feat performed in eight days. His play was 
indeed refused a license till the Empire came to set a 
more liberal standard of theatrical morals, but once 
produced it achieved immediate success. February 2, 
1852, is a true milestone in the history of the French 
stage ; for Dumas' drama marked a revolution as pro- 
found and more lasting than the Eomantic, though it 
had come with none of the pompous heralding of 
"Hernani." It was the beginning of the realistic study 
of social problems that has changed the face of the 
modern drama. Balzac had seen the need, but had not 
the necessary knowledge of the stage to achieve suc- 
cess. To his keen insight into character Dumas added 
an innate aptness for the technique of Scribe. He tells 
us in a frank preface how he started out resolute and 
free in search of truth, but inspired less by poetic fer- 
vor than by need of money, and therefore perhaps the 
more careful to remember that for its successful pres- 
entation this dramatic truth must be shown conven- 
tionally, logically. So from the first he developed his 
pieces according to strict sequence, and he has known 
how to answer the Naturalists who have blamed him 
for this sacrifice of theoretic realism with convincing 
vigor and biting acerbity. 

1 In 1845. It was reprinted as a curiosity in 1868. 



372 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

" The Lady with the Camelias " is a study from the 
life of an acquaintance of the author, a lady of easy 
virtue, who loves in the Marion de Lorme fashion with 
a " virginity of the heart/' and sacrifices her life to her 
affection. " Much shall be forgiven her, for she loved 
truly," is the conclusion of the author. The subject 
dates back to Provost's novel " Manon Lescaut," and 
had been dramatized by Palissot in 1782, but neither 
of these writers had ventured wholly to rehabilitate 
the courtesan. Then Hugo, both in " Marion " and in 
" Les Miserables," had gone a step farther in his Ro- 
mantic sympathy, and now Dumas opened wide the 
arms of society to the penitent. It was a time of 
social ferment, when a theory needed only to be ex- 
travagant to find imitators. For several years the stage 
abounded with these festering lilies until common- 
sense returned, as we have seen, with Augier's ''Ma- 
nage d'Olympe," which taught a harder though a 
truer social philosophy. But it is not in its social 
ethics that the importance of Dumas' play lies, but in 
its naturalism, in its presentation of present social 
conditions and characters with a reality that the Ro- 
manticists had not desired, nor the Neo-Classicists 
approached. 

The strength of this play remained Dumas' perma- 
nent possession ; its ethical vagaries were speedily 
abandoned. Already in "Diane de Lys" the author 
showed a little of the satiric misogynist, and in the 
henpecked Taupin created a standing butt of the 
Parisian humorous journals, while he was ready now 
to defend the integrity of the family with a pistol, as 
Augier did two years later in " Olyinpe," which was a 
much stronger piece of work in spite of this lame 
conclusion. But Dumas had now found his vocation. 






THE EVOLUTION OF THE DRAMA. 373 

All the dramas that follow are written with a purpose 
and to prove some social thesis, the more paradoxical 
the better. And that there may be no mistake about 
it, nearly all of the thirteen are provided with prefaces 
of considerable length, where the author takes the 
spectator into his confidence and argues with him in 
easy, forceful prose, — always, he assures you, with per- 
fect frankness, and sometimes perhaps with too little 
restraint, as when in his pursuit of social reform he 
is eager to pull aside the veil from body as well as 
mind, and degrades love to the level of physiological 
pathology. 

For woman — that is, the baleful influence of modern 
love — is his perennial theme, which he twists and turns 
and views from every side. He would eradicate from 
the youth of France the false sentiment of Eomantic 
passion and chivalrous love, and so emancipate the com- 
ing generation for a more independent, virile develop- 
ment. Like his Ami des femmes he has " made up his 
mind never to give his honor, heart, or life to be 
devoured by those charming, terrible little creatures, 
for whom we ruin, dishonor, and kill ourselves, and 
whose sole occupation in the midst of this universal 
carnage is to dress now like umbrellas and now like 
bells." This note of warning is the burden through- 
out. It is the avowed purpose of the " Demi-monde," 
" L'Ami des femmes," " Une Visite de noces," " La Prin- 
cesse Georges," " La Femme de Claude," and " L'Etran- 
gkre." It is present, though masked, in "Le Pere 
prodigue," a half-autobiographical drama of education, 
and in "Le Fils naturel," a study of illegitimacy. It 
colors " Les Idees de Mme. Aubray " of which the 
ostensible theme is the rehabilitation of a fallen wo- 
man, and casts a faint shadow even on " La Question 



374 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

d'argent," that both in subject and treatment suggests 
Augier's "Effrontes." 

The first of these, " Le Demi-monde/' had the curious 
fortune to give its name, a coinage of the author, to a 
class of persons with whom it has nothing whatever to 
do. His demi-monde is made up of those who have 
been members of society, but have abandoned or for- 
feited their place in it without sinking to the rank of 
courtesans. He tells us in his preface how society's 
first exile " mourned her shame in secret till the second 
came to console her. Then, when there were three, 
they asked one another to dinner, and when there were 
four they had a contredanse. Around them gathered 
young girls who had started in life with a fault, false 
widows . . . and all the women who want to make 
believe that they are something and do not want to 
appear what they are." That is the demi-monde, a 
social zone that Dumas claimed to have discovered, 
and certainly explored with great keenness and un- 
flinching realism in the treatment of individual char- 
acters, though the construction of the drama is open 
to criticism and its close is a bit of legerdemain unwor- 
thy of a serious dramatic situation. Moreover here, 
as indeed in all his plays, Dumas treats the prejudices 
of his hearers and the conventions of society with a 
persistent neglect on which no other dramatist would 
venture. 

Perhaps the chief interest to-day in the stock -gam- 
bling comedy " La Question d'argent " is that it marks 
and illustrates the rising power of the speculative 
plutocracy during the first decade of the Empire. 
Here the humor is frankly comic. In the " Eils na- 
turel " it is more caustic, differing in this, as in the 
pathetic delicacy of the intrigue and the courageous 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE DRAMA. 375 

ingenuity of the close, from the drama of Diderot that 
its title and manner suggest. Very much the same 
might be said of " Le Pere prodigue," an illustration 
of the well-worn maxim that "there is no fool like 
an old fool/' especially when the French conventional 
marriage is in question. But both of these plays yield 
in interest to a third drama of character in Diderot's 
manner, " Les Id^es de Mme. Aubray," where we are 
invited to study the social and matrimonial eligibility 
of a girl who has been betrayed into a single repented 
error. Madame Aubray finds Jeanne a desirable match 
for her own young hopeful, Camille. This denoue- 
ment is pronounced by one of the characters at the 
close to be "pretty steep," and this seemed to be the 
popular judgment, in spite of Dumas' eloquent preface, 
where, however, it is significant to note that for the first 
time he lets the preacher get the upper hand of the 
playwright, and seems more anxious to commend his 
social eccentricity or moral paradox than to prove the 
excellence of the drama itself. This shifting of the 
relation between art and ethics is perpetuated in nearly 
all the later plays, and thus gives Dumas a dramatic 
position that is quite unique. 

The main element in " M. Alphonse," for instance, 
is an appeal to the public to abandon one of its most 
deeply rooted prejudices. The individual characters 
are sympathetic, and the play is almost faultless in 
structure ; but these merits are almost overshadowed 
l»y its perverse sociology. We are puzzled rather than 
convinced by this tale of six years of calm wedded 
life, followed by the discovery that the wife has a 
half-grown daughter, whom the husband is finally 
suffered to adopt, though not without some competi- 
tion for the doubtful honor. 



376 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

Alternating with these, dramas of characters or 
states, are four plays that continue the investigation 
begun in " Demi-monde," and already ably treated in 
Augier's " Lionnes pauvres." There is, however, a 
cynical tone in the treatment of marriage, both in 
"L'Ami des femmes," which an outraged spectator is 
said to have proclaimed " disgusting," and " Une Visite 
de noces," which its author has aptly characterized as 
" a psycho-philosophical chemical analysis." And this 
makes rather disheartening reading of both these pessi- 
mistic pictures of the dust and ashes of relations that, 
as the heroine of the latter play remarks, "began be- 
cause I was bored, and ended because he bored me." 
" La Princesse Georges " was more ambitious and more 
healthy; but even this needed a pistol-shot to clear 
the air at the close, which was, again, a lame and impo- 
tent conclusion. Dumas resorted to it once more, how- 
ever, in " La Femme de Claude," whose thesis is that 
husbands should kill their adulterous wives, — a view 
that the author took so much to heart as to defend it 
in an eloquent preface, and in a pamphlet, " L'Homme- 
Femme," which amused many and convinced none. It 
may be observed, however, that the doctrine is only 
that of Augier's "Olympe" in its baldest form. 

Men might regret Dumas' ethical eccentricities, but 
they could not close their eyes to his talent, and in 
1875 he was elected to the Academy. As a conse- 
quence of this, his next dramatic sermon was written 
for the Theatre Frangais and for Sarah Bernhardt, 
while the previous plays had been produced at the 
less serious Gymnase. In "L'Etrangkre " we are 
still in the demi-monde, but the whole is a curious 
pastiche of Augier's "Poirier." Mrs. Clarkson, the 
" stranger," is in this drama what Madame de 



THE EYOLUTON OP THE DKAMA. 377 

Montjaye was to -Augier's, Antoinette is Catherine, 
Gaston is Septmonts, Poirier very nearly Moriceau. 
The god-father Verdelet becomes here the modest lover 
Gdrard, which, to be sure, adds an element of complex- 
ity to the situation. One should note, too, that with 
Dumas both the wife and the rival are more prominent 
than with Augier, a difference that reflects the social 
changes of twenty years of democratic life. Augier's 
touch is more delicate, and his play is better con- 
structed. Dumas' is more versatile and realistic, but 
it has far too much sermonizing, and again we have 
a violent denouement. Catherine's unworthy lover 
cumbers the stage, but the deus ex machina of a fatal 
duel is a trite and unsatisfactory solution. 

This play closes the collected edition of Dumas' 
works ; and though he afterward returned to the 
stage at rare intervals, he touched no new chord. 
Indeed, "La Princesse de Bagdad" is distinguished 
among the author's dramas by a quite peculiar lack 
of good taste and common-sense ; 2 " Denise " is a 
revamping of " M. Alphonse ; " and " Francillon," while 
it shows a marked advance on these in the delineation 
of character, especially of the three men in the drama, 
shrinks from the full force of the situation it creates. 
We are allowed to suppose that the wife has resorted 
to the lex talionis to secure her husband's conjugal 
fidelity, and are ill edified to find that she has been 
shamming, so that the problem in which it was sought 
to interest us suddenly ceases to exist. Popular as 
" Francillon " has been at home and abroad, it lacks 
classic dignity, a fault shared in greater or less degree 
by all the dramatic work of Dumas. 

For from first to last the wit of these plays is that 
1 See the elaborate analysis in " Revue bleue," April, 1895. 



378 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

of the society they represent. It raises a laugh, but 
the laugh is not a kindly one. The language, too, is 
that of the salons, full of neologisms, and in the earlier 
plays of solecisms, though the Academician has re- 
moved these from the collected works. On the other 
hand, it is not the language of everybody. It has a 
wonderfully individual concision and clearness ; it is 
" all muscles, nerves, and action." Passing from form 
to substance, Dumas appears both more and less of a 
realist than Augier, — more, if by realism we mean the 
daring that seeks veils in order to rend them, that has 
not only the courage but the yearning to " tell it all ; " 
less, if by realism we mean the presentation of nature 
in its rounded completeness. The former represents 
the practice, if not the theory, of the self-styled Natu- 
ralists, so that it is not strange that Zola * should hail 
him as a forerunner, though he regretted his advocacy 
of le theatre utile and the didactic tone in which this 
cynical painter of manners posed as a shepherd of souls. 
But Dumas was quite too much of an artist to accept 
the theory or care for the praise of the school of 
"human documents." 

In Dumas there was a double nature. He shows us 
now the visionary social reformer, now the sardonic 
blagueur. No one can tell the measure of his sincerity 
when he offers his " Demi-monde " as a title to the 
Monthyon prize. But his moralizing, whether sincere 
or not, has the effect of making his characters abstract 
types, a pitfall that he saw and tried to avoid in 
" Francillon." Of this, the most striking instance is 
to be found in the apocalyptic vision of the Beast in 
the famous preface to " La Femme de Claude." These 
types seem sometimes to get possession of the drama- 
1 Roman experimental, p. 134. 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE DRAMA. 379 

tist, so that he, who can create so readily when he will, 
repeats characters over and over, and with declared 
intent. He has told us himself that Gaston in the 
"Dame aux camdlias," Maximilien of "Diane," and 
Olivier of the " Demi-monde " are studies of the same 
original, who reappears also as Eend in " La Question 
d'argent," and as M. de Eyons in " L'Ami des femmes ; " 
and as though this were not enough, we recognize the 
familiar face in the Eoger of the unacknowledged 
" Danicheffs." * So, again, Clemenceau's wife, Iza, is 
the Countess de Terremonde of " Princesse Georges " 
and the Valentine of " Demi-monde," as well as the 
incarnate " Beast " of the " Femme de Claude." But, for 
all this, no French dramatist of that day is so purposeful 
or forceful as Dumas fits. 

But if Augier and Dumas learned much from Scribe, 
the mantle of his popularity fell to Sardou, a play- 
wright of more tact and technical skill, but of far 
less genius than either. Sardou was a Parisian, 2 who, 
already in 1849, when a student of medicine, had es- 
sayed dramatic composition, from which family mis- 
fortunes soon forced him to seek a livelihood. But 
few who have achieved fame and fortune have had a 

1 Matthews, p. 147, uses the same obvious illustrations. 

2 Born 1831, died 1908. Chief dramas : Les Pattes de mouche, 
1861 ; Nos intimes, 1861 ; Les Ganaches, 1862; La Famille Benoiton, 
1865; Nos bons villageois, 1866; Seraphine, 1868; Patrie, 1869; Fer- 
nande, 1870; Le Roi Carotte, 1871 ; Ragabas, 1872 ; Oncle Sam, 1873 ; 
La Haine, 1874; Dora, 1877; Les Bourgeois du pont d'Arcy, 1878; 
Daniel Rochat, 1880; Divorcons, 1880; Odette, 1881; Fedora, 1882 ; 
Theodora, 1884 ; Georgette, 1885 ; La Tosca, 1887 ; Thermidor, 1891 ; 
Madame Sans-Gene, 1893; La Gismonda, 1894; Marcelle, 1895 ; Spiri- 
tisme, 1897; Pamela, 1898; Robespierre, 1899; Le Dante, 1903; La 
Sorciere, 1903 ; La Piste, his fifty-fifth drama, 1906. For criticism see 
the already cited works of Lacour, Doumic, and Matthews. 



380 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

harder struggle up the hill of difficulty than he. Even 
when the kindness of Paul F£val, a writer of far infe- 
rior genius, had procured him a hearing, it was only 
to be hissed. Yet the repeated refusals of his dramas 
did not discourage his literary ambition. He gave 
private lessons, did hack work for the " Biographie 
g^n^rale," and wrote stories with tireless industry. 
Finally, on the strength of his repeated failures, he 
married, and his marriage was the " Open sesame " of 
his success ; for it brought him the friendship of the 
actress Ddjazet and of Vanderbuch, with w r hom he 
wrote several plays that brought money to D^jazet's 
theatre and the long-craved recognition to Sardou. 

The stage of Paris was now open to him, and over 
it he led a swift succession of pieces, some twenty in 
five years. But his first real success was won by " Les 
Pattes de mouche," a comedy based on Poe's "Pur- 
loined Letter," which Baudelaire's translation had re- 
cently made familiar to French readers. 1 Here the 
intrigue revolves around a letter that is lost and found, 
put to the most various uses, and at last sets all right 
again. It was a shop-worn device ; but Sardou has 
revamped it in " Fernande," in " Dora," and in " Fedora," 
and Pailleron has borrowed it for his " Monde oh Ton 
s'ennuie." In u Les Pattes de mouche" the plot is 
perhaps too involved; but it was less for this than for 
its brilliant dialogue and as a genre picture of modern 
social life that it won lasting success, and set up a 
model for the inexhaustible fertility of its author. He 
had felt the bitterness of poverty and of popular in- 
difference. Now that he had overcome both, he set 
himself to win notoriety and wealth. To please be- 

1 Poe's story has recrossed the Atlantic, disguised as " A Scrap of 
Paper/' essentially a translation of Sardou's play. 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE DRAMA. 381 

came his aim, and Jtie hit his mark with almost unfail- 
ing sureness. But the barometer of the box-office 
gave the fairest augury when his satire of society was 
buoyant and keen. His public were willing to laugh at 
their foibles, but it must be with a light heart ; and so 
Sardou is never serious or stern, with a single excep- 
tion that proves the rule. The incompetence of the 
French democracy was hateful to his peculiar public, 
and that hate is reflected in the bitterness of "Les 
Ganaches" and of "Kagabas." 

The great mass of Sardou's early plays has passed 
out of sight, 1 but " La Famille Benoiton " marks a 
growth in Naturalism, and a willingness to touch the 
social questions of the day, though less seriously than 
Augier, with whose " Lionnes pauvres " this series of 
realistic Parisian pictures may be fruitfully contrasted. 
The galled jades may have winced, but they must have 
smiled. Sardou's satire was never of a kind to offend 
his patrons, and he had already won their sympathy 
with a humorous attack on the democratic opposi- 
tion to the Empire. He was a politician for revenue 
not for reform, though no doubt he sympathized with 
the Bonapartists from conviction as well as policy. 
His " Ganaches " brought him the coveted cross of the 
Legion of Honor ; for the all-powerful Due de Morny 
had, like Eichelieu, a weakness for the stage, and a 
Napoleonic author was a genus rare enough to be cul- 
tivated with care. He returned the compliment with 
" Nos bons villageois," an urban satire on country 
politicians ; but both of these political plays were cast 

1 " Nos intimes," once very popular and familiar to English readers 
under the various names, u Friends and Foes." " Bosom Friends," and 
"Peril," deserves mention as a clever satire on the busy bodies of false 
friendship. 



382 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

in the shade by " Kabagas," a bold caricature of Gram- 
betta, where also Napoleon III. and Garibaldi appear 
under transparent veils. Here the Bonapartist, disap- 
pointed at the unexpected stability of the Third Ee- 
public, poured out the vials of his scornful hate on the 
new regime and the demagogues who typified to him 
the national decay. Again he returned to this Quixotic 
charge in "Les Bourgeois du pont d'Arcy," a rather 
mediocre domestic drama, in which politics form the 
redeeming feature. It was two months after the pro- 
duction of this play (1878) that Sardou took his seat 
among the dramatists of the Academy, and that sturdy 
democrat, Charles Blanc, who welcomed him, took him 
pleasantly to task for these incursions into u a world 
that was not his." But nothing daunted at this repub- 
lican warning that the spirit of the empire was dead, 
at least for that generation, Sardou ventured, in 1880, 
to draw on his head the more rancorous rage of the 
clergy. His " Daniel Eochat " attacked what he re- 
garded as the regrettable prejudice that still couples 
a religious ceremony with the civil marriage. But it 
is only charity to leave this play in the limbo into 
which it almost immediately fell. 

And now, piqued by this check, and jealous of his 
popularity, Sardou hastened to efface the impression of 
" Eochat," and to place himself in accord with the 
prejudices and the frivolity of his auditors by the 
witty and not too scrupulous farce, " Divorcjons," which 
in three hundred performances brought the Palais 
Eoyal theatre $300,000. The reform in the divorce 
laws of 1816, finally effected in 1884, was already 
vigorously urged in 1880, and Sardou handled it 
deftly so as to please his public by a sane conclusion 
and a healthy satire of the long line of dramas that, 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE DKAMA. 383 

since " Antony/' had coquetted with adultery and half 
condoned it. " DivorQons " may be only a popgun 
beside the heavy artillery of Dumas and Augier ; but 
it is much to make people laugh heartily in a good 
cause, to make the husband whose honor is threatened 
a subject of admiration not of pity, — in short, to make 
respectability more attractive than the primrose path. 

Meantime Sardou had been developing from the 
social and political satire the drama of states or char- 
acters, in which he studies a single person, usually a 
woman, rather than a class or group. As early as 
1866 he had attempted a study of feminine religious 
hypocrisy in a piece that he would have called " The 
Devotee.'' But the imperial censors, being disposed, 
like the Puritans of Hudibras, to " atone for sins they 
were inclined to by damning those they had no mind 
to," objected, and so the play appeared under the less 
distinctive name of its heroine S^raphine, a lady of 
fashion who is under such conviction of sin that she 
longs to have her daughter make vicarious satisfaction 
for it by entering a nunnery. A somewhat similar 
study of character is " Fernande," a rather trite story 
of the lily on the dunghill, Fernande in the gambling- 
house of her mother. The girl loves and marries a 
man who, through no fault of hers, is ignorant of the 
tainted environment of his bride. The situation is 
Diderot's, but the delightful ingenuousness with which 
Fernande regains the love of the now undeceived and 
outraged husband produced so telling an effect that 
Sardou sought to repeat it in "Dora," our English 
"Diplomacy," where also he played skilfully on the 
morbid dread of spies that has set all France quivering 
at intervals since the revelations of 1870. To this 
same class belong " Odette " and " Georgette," studies 



384 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

of maternal love in otherwise frail women. These sug- 
gest the subjects of Dumas, but they are both accom- 
panied by spectacular effects such as have come to be 
the peculiar mark of the latest phase of Sardou's versa- 
tile genius. 

This tact and boldness in scenic sensation was 
revealed in all its glory in " Fddora," where the mys- 
terious activity of the Russian Nihilists is drawn upon 
for a thrilling drama of crime. But " Fedora " is far 
more than a sensational spectacle, it is a drama of 
wonderful energy ; effects crowd on one another in 
such quick succession that .the spectator has no time 
to reflect on their probability as he sees the heroine 
caught in her own snares. To her the other charac- 
ters are wholly subordinated, partly because this lies 
in the nature of the drama of states, partly because 
like the later plays it was written for Sarah Bernhardt, 
who naturally desired no rival, and so has done much 
to limit the expression of Sardou's genius. 

These later plays are in the main historical and 
spectacular. He had attempted this style already with 
success in a Patrie,' , a drama of the Spanish Nether- 
lands, dedicated to Mr. Motley, and regarded by an 
American critic as " the firmest and finest specimen of 
Sardou's skill." He repeated the venture in " La Haine," 
and obviously selected the subject of "Thdodora" 
more for its scenic than for its dramatic qualities, 
though into the strange splendor of his Byzantine 
court the author has introduced a quick succession of 
emotional effects by the jealous violence of Justinian 
and the imperious will of her who had risen from the 
circus to the throne. Taken as a whole, however, this 
piece, even more than "Fedora," is addressed to the 
eye rather than to the, ear, to the ear rather than 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE DRAMA. 385 

to the mind. There are probably but few scenes that 
would repay a reader's study, a sure sign that we have 
passed beyond the sphere of serious dramatic literature. 
Since this is equally true of all the plays that 
followed, even to the last, they may be briefly dis-, 
missed here, while in regard to certain travesties for 
the foreign market utter silence is golden. 1 Such 
work must be content to measure its success by com- 
mercial standards ; and so measured these plays are 
almost unrivalled. Still in nearly every drama Sardou 
will give to one or two scenes a literary elaboration 
that does not let us forget his power. Such will occur 
to every spectator of " La Tosca," a curious attempt 
to combine the interest of " Fedora " with that of 
" Marion de Lorme ; " they recur in " Thermidor," a 
political spectacle of the Eeign of Terror, where Sardou 
shows himself still faithful to the position of " Eaga- 
bas;" they can be found in "Madame Sans-Gene," 
which is otherwise little more than an adaptation of 
the earlier work of Moreau to the revival of interest 
in the Napoleonic legend, and they characterize 
also " Eobespierre " and " Gisinonda," where Constanti- 
nople under the brief rule of the Latin emperors 
offers a picturesque contrast between the mediaeval 
West and the still Greek Byzantium. Here the wily 
Sardou dazzles the auditors with the most gorgeous 
spectacle ever attempted in France, while he tickles 
democratic ears that were offended by "Thermidor" 
with the triumph of a parvenu, the denunciation of 

1 The curious may examiDe " Oncle Sam," whose only interest lies 
in the monumental silliness of its ignorance ; " Andrea," originally 
produced in New York as " Agnes ; " or " Le Crocodile," that in spite 
of some political spice is hardly up to the level of a Drury-Lane 
pantomime. 

25 



386 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

papal intrigue, and a little fillip of irreligion in a few 
well-placed speeches. 

One will hardly sum up better the total impression 
of Sardou's versatile genius than to call him with 
Lanson "an eminent vaudevillist." Like Scribe he 
imported into the serious drama only the taste for 
sensational and spectacular effects that tends to corrupt 
the stage and to make it artificial and insincere. Like 
Scribe he was an artist for art, a handicraftsman with 
no higher purpose than to fill the theatre and his 
pockets. With his finger on the public pulse he had 
an instinct to divine the popular heart, to seem all 
things to all men, to praise Haussmann in " Les 
Ganaches," and to damn him in " Maison neuve," to 
turn every popular enthusiasm and prejudice to pri- 
vate account, to live in the belief that "the voice 
of the people is the voice of God." In the evolution 
of the drama he is the natural product of literary 
democracy. His frequent borrowings 1 might be for- 
given him, but he will not live because his genius, like 
Scribe's, is insincere. 

The great strength of his work, apart from its stage 
setting, is its lively dialogue, that in spite of its 
brilliancy never ceases to appear natural, and after 
this his skill in dramatic suspense. These he is apt 
to employ alternately, for he does not waste his pow- 
der. He will make his hearers laugh for two acts, 
and then bring up the fresh reserve force of his in- 
trigue to hold them breathless for the last three. He 
was more free in the use of slang even than Dumas, 
and did not scorn to enliven his Parisian dialogue with 
puns and parodied quotations, chiefly from Hugo. Of 
course his dramas have a happy ending, except where 
1 For instances see Matthews, 1. c. p. 186. 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE DRAMA. 387 

the public demanded an artistic death-scene from the 
genial Bernhardt, when he was ready to make a facile 
concession to the box-office. And for the same reason 
Sardou was always careful to place himself on the safe 
side in morals, on the side of the family and the 
philistine bourgeois. He was especially gallant to the 
ladies. "In my pieces/' he said, "they always have 
the best part, — that of goodness, tenderness, and devo- 
tion." If he had not the conviction of Augier he had 
not the skepticism of Dumas. Instinct and interest 
combined to make him the most frankly commercial 
of modern playwrights, a clever salesman of his wit, 
the true successor of Scribe, "with double portion of 
his father's art." 

Augier, Dumas, and Sardou are by universal con- 
sent the great playwrights of the last generation; nor 
did any of their fellows contribute essentially to the 
evolution of the art, save the Naturalistic iconoclasts 
whose excursions into the theatrical domain had more 
negative than positive results. But before we speak 
of these, there are several men whose work did so 
much to preserve the supremacy of the French stage 
in Europe that they should not be passed unnoticed 
here. Of these the most interesting is Labiche 
whose dramatic career presents an interest that is 
quite unique. Popular almost from the first, his 
higher qualities were not appreciated by the critics till 
he had withdrawn from active literary life to the dig- 
nified leisure so dear to the French heart ; and it was 
from his country-house in Normandy that he was called 
to take his seat in the French Academy, the highest 
honor that France has to bestow on her men of intellect. 

Labiche was born on May 5, 1815, in the midst of 
the Hundred Days of Napoleon's desperate attempt to 



388 MODERN FEENCH LITERATURE. 

regain his throne. Like his friend Augier and several 
other of his dramatic associates, he studied for the 
bar ; but this proved distasteful to him, and at twenty 
he began his literary career with stories in the news- 
papers, which he followed up, three years later, with a 
novel and his first drama, " M. de Coyllin," written 
with the double collaboration of Michel and Lefranc. 
Though this play had very small success, the stage 
fascinated him, and for nearly forty years (1838-1876) 
he continued to pour out a succession of farces and 
comedies, of which only the best are gathered in the 
ten volumes of his so-called " Theatre complet." 

In 1876, anticipating the waning of his popularity, 
he retired to Normandy, wealthy, but with no prospect 
of enduring fame. He seemed to leave no gap behind 
in the dramatic world. Fortunately, however, he car- 
ried with him the friendship of Augier, who, while 
visiting him some months after, fell to reading on an 
idle day some of his friend's comedies, and found as 
much to admire in them as in their author. Charmed 
with his discovery, he persuaded Labiche to publish a 
collected edition of his plays, for which he furnished a 
warm preface. Others — among them Sarcey, the dra- 
matic autocrat of Paris — chimed in the chorus of praise, 
and in 1879 no one found it presumptuous that he 
whose departure had not left a ripple on the surface of 
literary Paris should return as a candidate for the 
Academy, which in these latter days has been pecu- 
liarly cordial to playwrights, as though wishing to 
make honorable amends for the exclusion of Beaumar- 
chais and Molifere. 1 Labiche was made an Acade- 

1 His dramatic colleagues in the Academy of 1880 were Hugo, 
Augier, Dumas fils, Feuillet, Sandeau, Sardou, making, with Labiche, 
more than a sixth of the Forty Immortals. 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE DRAMA. 389 

mician in 1880 ; but he could not be tempted to 
resume literary work, and died January 23, 1888. 

All the best qualities of Labiche's work 1 are con- 
tained in his " Voyage de M. Perrichon." While he is 
always witty, he seldom holds up so true or so polished 
a mirror to the foibles of human nature as in this com- 
edy, though the very exuberance of his humor some- 
times hides its truth, as it does that of Beaumarchais. 
M. Lemoine said, in welcoming Labiche to the Acad- 
emy, that, however light or venturesome some of his 
plays might be, they were never immoral because they 
were never sentimental. But " Perrichon " can be 
accepted with even less reserve than the majority of 
his collected works. Here the humor is rather that 
of situation and of character than of what Butler calls 
"cat and puss" dialogue, the classic stichomachia, or 
that riotous fancy that, as Mr. Matthews puts it, 
" grins through a horse-collar." Behind the mask of 
caricature, the attentive reader will not fail to see, 
with Augier, delicacy of tone, accuracy of expression, 
and an unflagging vivacity. " Seek," the same writer 
continues, " among the highest works of our generation 
for a comedy of more profound observation than ' Per- 
richon/ . . . And Labiche has ten plays of this strength 
in his repertory." The number is, perhaps, a little too 
great; but while his farces and extravaganzas won 

1 For critical appreciation of Labiche's comedies, see Augier's pref- 
ace to the The'atre complet ; Nouvelle Revue, Oct. 1, 1880; Dumas, 
Entr'actes, iii. 336; and, best of all, Matthews, French Dramatists, 
224 sqq., who has traced the well-known English farces, u Box and 
Cox," " Little Toddlekins," and " The Phenomenon in a Smock Frock," 
to Labiche, and has found "Papa Perrichon " in the repertory of the 
Boston Museum. See also the introduction to the author's edition of 
"Perrichon" (Boston: Heath) for a fuller criticism of that play, to- 
gether with much that is said above. 



390 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

their meed of ephemeral praise, in "Perrichon" and 
four or five other plays, Labiche rose to pure comedy, 
and set up in the domain of literature a work whose 
social philosophy gives it enduring life, and makes him, 
as Dumas says, "one of the finest and frankest of 
comic poets since Plautus, and perhaps the only one 
to be compared with him." * 

In this lighter vein of comedy Meilhac and Halevy 2 
achieved great distinction during the Second Empire, 
an eminence that they seemed in later days willing 
to exchange for a humbler place in the legitimate 
drama. To the generation that is passing away they 
were known " from China to Peru " as the composers 
of Offenbach's most popular librettos, and admired 
equally at home as the authors of farces of more than 
usual levity. Their first great success was "La Belle 
H£lkne," which caught admirably the mocking Hague 
of Cremieux' " Orphde aux enfers," a strain continued 
in " Barbe-bleue," " La Grande duchesse " and " Car- 
men." It was not till toward the close of the Empire 
that they essayed the serious drama in " Frou-Frou " 
(1869), one of the greatest theatrical successes of the 
century and wholly different from the farcical work 
that had preceded it. The earlier portions suggest 

1 To this higher range of comedy belong " Celimare le Bien-Aime," 
"Le Plus heureux des trois," "Cagnotte," and "Moi, " of which the 
two latter may be commended for general reading. Among the best 
of the farces are " Poudre aux yeux " and " La Grammaire." 

2 Meilhac (b. 1831, d. 1888) began writing for the stage in 1855, 
and was closely associated with Halevy from 1861 to 1881. His best 
independent pieces are " La Vertu de Celimene," 1861, and "Decore," 
1888; his last, " Grosse fortune," 1896. 

Halevy (b. 1834, d. 1908) turned after 1881 to novelistic and satiric 
sketches, e. g., L'Abbe Constantin, 1882 ; La Famille Cardinal, 1883; 
Criquette, 1883. Both were members of the Academy. Matthews, 1. c, 
has a chapter on their joint dramatic work, which is collected in 
Theatre de Meilhac et Halevy, 8 vols., 1900-1902. 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE DRAMA. 391 

the seriousness of Augier as they lay bare the results 
to moral character of the restless grasping for pleasure 
that marked the social life of the declining Empire, 
and show how it corrodes heart and conscience. To- 
ward the close the sternness of satire yields to melo- 
dramatic emotion and an elegiac note predominates in 
the final scene, where the poor crushed butterfly Frou- 
Frou, racked by consumption, returns to her husband, 
embraces her child, and dies on the stage, a concession, 
like those of Sardou, to the demands of the great 
actress Bernhardt. Other ventures of these dioscuri 
of realistic or farcical satire are "Fanny Lear," 
"Tricoche et Cacolet," and "La Boule;" but these 
reflect rather the violent sensational method of 
" La Dame aux cam^lias " than the individuality of 
Meilhac and Hal^vy, that best shows its sparkling 
effervescence and genuine dramatic force in such little 
one-act plays as " Eeveillon " or the unsavory but 
clever " Toto chez Tata." 

In more recent years a novel turn has been given to 
social satire by Pailleron's " Monde ou Ton s'ennuie " 
(1881), one of the best comedies of its generation and 
one of the historic successes of the Theatre Frangais, 
though it is the only important work of its author. 1 
" The World of Boredom " is that of Molifere's " Femmes 
savantes " as they appear in our day, with their affecta- 
tion of learning, their scholarly and aesthetic pretensions, 
masking an active intrigue for government promotions 
and official distinctions. It added to the vogue of the 
play that the characters were more photographic than 

1 Pailleron (b. 1834, d. 1899) published several volumes of poetry 
and dramatic trifles. " Les Cabotins " (1894) is of a higher order, and 
a single scene of '■ Le Monde oil Ton s'amuse (1868) is often cited as a 
masterpiece of stage-craft. His last plays were " Mieux vaut douceur," 
1897, and " Et violence," 1907. 



392 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

typical. The triteness of the plot was readily forgiven 
for the satiric verve of the dialogue and the piquant 
delicacy of delineations that all Paris recognized in 
spite of the faint denials of the author. 

Thus far we have spoken of men who were pre-emi- 
nently dramatists. A word must be said of those who 
have achieved greater distinction in other fields, and, 
finally, of the effort to apply to the stage the pseudo- 
Naturalistic theory of the " human document," or, as 
those would-be dramatists said, to present "slices of 
life." Among the novelists George Sand, Ohnet, and 
Daudet essayed the legitimate drama, as did also the 
poets Banville, Coppde, and the critic Lemaitre, of 
whose work it is more convenient to speak elsewhere. 1 
There is one novelist, however, Octave Feuillet, whose 
best dramatic work synchronizing with that of Augier 
has a peculiar individuality. Feuillet began life as a 
collaborator of the elder Dumas, but he presently de- 
serted the Eomantic banner, and set up his own estab- 
lishment as the "Family Musset," the purveyor of 
novels and plays that should make the concession to 
prejudice rather than morals of avoiding those extra- 
marital relations so common in the work of Dumas 
fits, Augier, and Sardou. Beneath this varnish of moral- 
ity, however, we have a maximum of ethical perversion ; 
for, as Shakspere knew, " Lilies that fester smell far 
worse than weeds." Indeed his plays are so funda- 
mentally unhealthy, such hot-house growths, that one 
feels that Feuillet survived himself when he survived 
the Empire and the patronage of Eugenie. 2 

1 See chapters xi., xii., xiii., and ix. 

2 I name only Cheveu blanc, 1856; Le Roman (Tun jeune homme 
pauvre (dramatized 1858) ; La Tentation, La Belle au bois dormant, 
Montjoie, all before 1863. For a more favorable view of Feuillet's 
ethics, see Loti's Discours at his reception into the French Academy, 
and Doumic, op. cit. 



I 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE DRAMA. 393 

In all the work that has been noticed thus far the 
conventions of the stage as Scribe and the Eomanti- 
cists had left it had been observed ; but with the rise of 
dogmatic Naturalism a determined effort was made to 
conquer the drama for the theories that had been so 
rapidly propagated in the field of fiction. " The theatre 
will be Naturalistic or it will cease to be/' said the ever 
positive Zola, to whom the conservatism of the stage 
had long been a thorn in the flesh. Like the Boman- 
ticists of 1830, he and his fellows felt that the battle 
must be won on this field. The result of the struggle 
is instructive, for experience has corroborated theory 
in fixing the demarcation of the drama and fiction. 

Zola's " Naturalisme au theatre " was to be the new 
school's " Preface to Cromwell," and his " Eende " was 
to be the naturalistic " Hernani." 1 The former did 
not convince, and the latter was emphatically rejected 
both by the critics and the public. In the next year 
he returned to the charge in " Germinal," only to find 
those as dissatisfied and these more impatient. His 
piece was pronounced, with an allusion to his own 
vocabulary, to be both crevante and assommante. And 
yet the same critics and the same public would have 
agreed that the novels from which these plays were 
taken 2 were all good and one of them a masterpiece ; 
and that the fundamental situation of the former was 
essentially dramatic is attested by the success of 
Eacine's " Phfedre." Where, then, lies the secret of 
their failure, if not in this, that Naturalism is opposed 

1 "Renee" dates from 1887. Zola had already produced the 
strong but gloomy dramatized novel " Therese Raquin," 1873, and 
Busnach had successfully dramatized " L'Assommoir " in 1879. 

2 The novelistic sources are, for " Renee," " Nantas " and " La 
Curee;" for "Germinal," the novel of like name. 



394 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

to dramatic development, wluch then will appear to be 
different in its requirements from prose fiction? By 
sacrificing in their mistaken zeal for realistic effect 
the conventions essential to the dramatic genre, they 
stretched a snare in their own path. But they failed 
to notice an even more fundamental distinction. The 
modern pseudo-scientific novel is essentially neces- 
sitarian, it regards men as the products of birth and 
environment, while it is a fundamental condition of 
the drama to show will in action. 1 Hence the skilful 
playwright who dramatizes " Nana " or " L'Assommoir " 
subjects them to fundamental changes, without which 
no Naturalistic novel has ever succeeded on the stage. 2 
It is natural, however, that the artificiality of Scribe, 
of which the dramatists that have occupied us in this 
chapter retained perhaps too much, should have pro- 
voked a reaction toward greater realism in dramatic 
construction. A moderate representative of these re- 
forming tendencies is Becque, a realist with remarkable 
keenness of observation and irony. 3 More radical than 
he is Hennique, once the peculiar star of the Theatre 
Libre, which proposed to give the freest scope to 
dramatic experiment and reform. The tendency of his 
work is to break up the connected drama into a series 
of isolated scenes, 4 and so to increase the illusion of 
the spectator, who in real life is obliged to imagine the 
connection between the disjointed parts of any pro- 
longed action. 

1 See Brunetiere, Litterature contemporaine, p. 241 sqq. 

2 The most noteworthy failures have been the dramatizations of 
the Goncourts' " Renee Mauperin," " Germinie Lacertaux," and " La 
Eille Eliza," all backed by a most enthusiastic cabal. 

3 Born 1837. Characteristic dramas are " Le Corbeau " and " La Pa- 
risienne." Autobiography: Souvenirs d'un auteur dramatique, 1895. 

4 E. g., in La Mort du due d'Enghien, 1888. 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE DRAMA. 395 

The most noticeable tendencies in the drama of re- 
cent years are the revival of romanticisms in Eostand 
and Maeterlinck and the prominence given to social 
questions as evidenced in the dramas of Octave Mirbeau, 
Emile Fabre, Paul Hervieu, Henri Bernstein, Paul 
Margueritte, and Paul Bourget. 1 Eostand 2 won con- 
spicuous success in both hemispheres by " Cyrano de 
Bergerac" (1897), a marvel of spontaneity, wit, verve, 
finished versification, and polished diction. He ap- 
proached but did not equal this masterpiece in " L' Aiglon " 
(1900) and in what is known of the as yet unfinished 
" Cbantteler " 

Also in a class by himself is Maurice Maeterlinck, 
who beside a novel " Le Temple enseveli," several 
volumes of poems and philosophical essays, and a re- 
markable prose poem of natural history, " La Vie des 
abeilles," has published since 1889 fourteen dramas 
unique in their poetic fancy, ranging from the intense 
tragedy of " Monna Vanna " to the playful optimism of 
"The Blue Bird." 3 They are all dramas of thought 
rather than of action, at first full of haunting melan- 
choly, lurking fatality, and weird mystery, but growing 
later more serene, though still mystic in conception 
and elusive in their philosophic signification. 

1 E. g., Mirbeau, Les Affaires sont les affaires; Fabre, Les Ventres 
d'or and La Maison d'argile; Hervieu, Le Dedale and Le Reveil; 
Bernstein, Samson, Le Voleur, and Israel; Margueritte, L'Autre; 
Bourget, Un Divorce. 

2 Born 1869. Earlier plays are: Les Romanesques, 1894, and 
Princesse Lointaine, 1895. 

3 Characteristic dramas are Les Aveugles, 1890 ; PeUeas et Melis- 
ande, 1892 ; Ardiane et Barbe-bleue, 1901 ; Monna Vanna, 1902. 



396 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 



CHAPTEE XI. 

MODERN FICTION. — I. THE EVOLUTION OF NATURALISM. 

The Eomantic School won its first triumphs in lyric 
poetry, and enjoyed here its most lasting pre-eminence. 
From 1830 to 1843 it ruled the stage. But even dur- 
ing this period of its most unquestioned sway it could 
not obtain an unchallenged place in prose fiction. In 
this department it first became felt that in enfranchis- 
ing literature the Eomanticists had loosed too much 
the tie that bound it to reality. What had been won 
for individualism by De Vigny, Dumas, and Hugo was 
an inalienable possession ; but several more or less in- 
dependent novelists existed beside these, who were 
unconsciously paving the way for the naturalistic and 
psychological schools of the last generation. The 
analytic novelists of whom Bourget is a familiar type 
may find their origins in Constant's " Adolphe," and 
even more directly in the work of Stendhal and in the 
lyric egoism of George Sand's early romances ; * while 
Balzac and M^rim^e, though neither of them without 
a flavor of Eomanticism, first accentuate a movement 
that culminates with Maupassant and Zola. 

What separates these writers from the Eomantic 
movement is in no sense a reactionary protest, a re- 
turn to the methods of the eighteenth century. For 
just as Eomanticism was the. concomitant if not the 
1 See Brunetiere, Evolution de la poesie lyrique, p. 293 sqq. 



MODERN FICTION. — EVOLUTION OF NATURALISM. 397 

result in literature of the aspiration and effort for civil 
liberty that led to the Eevolution of 1830, so this 
movement toward realism has followed the develop- 
ment of the scientific spirit in popular instruction, and 
for that reason it sought its first expression in the 
novel, the most popular of literary genres, though it 
has spread thence like leaven through all forms of 
thought, and has exercised an influence as deep and 
more lasting than Eomanticism itself. 

Among these novelists the one who shows greatest 
affiliation with the Romantic spirit is George Sand, 
and with her, therefore, it is best to begin any effort 
to trace the evolution of French Naturalistic fiction, 
though she is the youngest of the forerunners of that 
school and survived its prime. It would perhaps be 
hard to find, at least in the higher reaches of author- 
ship, one in whose veins flowed more varied blood 
than was blended in Amantine-Aurore Dupin, 1 who as 
the divorced wife of M. Dudevant is the George 

1 Born 1804; died 1876. Of the 107 volumes of her works 84 con- 
tain prose fiction, 10 correspondence, 8 memoirs, and 5 drama. The 
chronology of her most typical novels is: First period — Indiana, 
1832; Valentine, 1832; Lelia, 1833; Jacques, 1834; Andre, 1835 
Leone Leoni, 1835 ; Mauprat, 1836. Second period — Spiridion, 1838 
Compagnon du tour de France, 1840; Horace, 1842; Consuelo, 1842, 
Comtesse de Rudolstadt, 1843; Meunier d'Angibault, 1845; Peche de 
M. Antoine, 1847. Third period (anticipated by Jeanne, 1844, and 
Mare au diable, 1846) — Teverino, 1848; Piccinino, 1848; La Petite 
Fadette, 1848, Francois le champi, 1850; Filleule, 1851; Mont Re- 
veche, 1851 ; Les Maitres sonneurs, 1852; Beaux messieurs du hois 
dore, 1858; Mile, de la Quintinie, 1863; Confession d'une jeune fille, 
1865; Mile, de Merquem, 1870. 

Criticism : Caro, George Sand (Grands ecrivains francais) ; Faguet, 
xix. siecle, p. 383 ; Brunetiere, Poesie lyrique, i. 295 sqq. ; France, Vie 
litteraire, i. 339; Lemaitre, Contemporains, iv. 159; Pellissier, Mouve- 
ment litteraire, p. 237 ; Lanson, Litterature francaise, p. 973 ; Taine, 
Nouvelles essais, p. 127; Devaux, George Sand. 



398 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

Sand of literary history. For while on her mother's 
side her ancestry is soon lost in plebeian depths, her 
father was a direct descendant of Augustus II. of 
Poland through the Count de Saxe, who left behind 
him a youth as redolent of gallant adventure as was 
the literary apprenticeship of his granddaughter. To 
her mother she doubtless owed her taste for the stage, 
and infant impressions of her maternal grandfather's 
bird-shop have lent their naivete to some charming 
scenes in " Teverino ; " but the prevailing impressions 
of her childhood were formed at Nohant, the estate of 
her father's mother, on the lovely river Indre in Berry, 
one of the most Arcadian regions in central France, 
whither she went at seven to draw from it the purest 
inspirations of her literary life. 

For here, while the democratic sympathies of her 
mother were maintained by frequent visits, they were 
softened by a daily contact with the old aristocracy, 
so that she realized more than any of the contemporary 
novelists what had been the true life of the ancien 
regime, as she showed, for instance, in " Le Marquis de 
Villemer." But her most fruitful lessons were not 
those of the chateau, but rather the unconscious educa- 
tion of Nature as she walked by the Indre or chased 
butterflies in the Dark Valley, with " Atala," " Paul 
and Virginia," or " Corinne " for a companion, or per- 
haps the tales of Bousseau, with the education of whose 
" Bmile " her own forms an instructive parallel. 

But when she was thirteen the wave of religious 
and conservative reaction that was passing over France 
persuaded Madame Dupin that it was time to con- 
form the education of her charge to the prejudices of 
prospective husbands ; and so the young girl, profi- 
cient in shooting, fencing, dancing, but such a child of 



MODEEN FICTION. — EVOLUTION OF NATURALISM. 399 

nature that she had not even learned to make the sign 
of the cross, was sent to the "Dames Anglaises," a 
fashionable conventual school in Paris, where her 
country manners immediately won her the nickname 
of " little boy." The rich food that her ardent im- 
agination found in the splendors of Roman ritual and 
in the peaceful solemnity of the cloister has its wit- 
ness in " Spiridion." She became for a time most ar- 
dent in her devotions, exceeding not only the rules 
of the school, but even the dictates of prudence, so 
that her superiors were constrained to check her 
fervor. But in 1820 she was recalled from this hot- 
bed of artificial emotions to her dying grandmother, 
and two years later the solitary and unprotected girl 
was overpersuaded by her relatives to marry Francois 
Dudevant, a country squire no better and no worse 
than most of his prosaic fellows, caring more to ex- 
tend his fields than his mind, more for good breeds 
of cattle than for good breeding. Now, of all men 
this philistine realist was the least suited to be the 
helpmate of an enthusiastic, emotional, and rather in- 
dependent girl. That he might employ her dowry of 
half a million francs to their common advantage, he 
thought it no robbery to neglect her heart. Many 
have borne a similar fate with philosophy and the 
consolations of their children, but her health broke 
down at length under the strain, and she returned to 
Nohant from a journey to the Pyrenees with the 
experience of having roused and resisted for the first 
time an ardent passion. 

This new vision of love filled her imagination. In 
vain she sought repose in art, in science, in literature. 
Desperate at last in 1828 she suddenly abandoned 
her husband and Nohant, and, after a brief interval 



400 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

of rest with the Dames Anglaises, supported herself 
for a time by coloring prints, leading the precarious 
Bohemian life of the students of the Latin Quarter. 
Here the Eevolution of July found her modest attic 
shared by Jules Sandeau, 1 with whom she wrote, under 
the pseudonym Jules Sand, the novel " Eose et Blanche," 
a work of such promise that she readily found a pub- 
lisher for " Indiana ; " and as this was hers alone, she 
signed it George Sand. 

Thus launched on a literary career, she wrote more 
than thirty volumes in ten years, all in the main 
under the direct inspiration of Eousseau, Chateau- 
briand, and her own experience of married life; for 
these novels of her first manner are busied almost 
wholly with the " unholy trinity " of husband, lover, 
and femme incomprise. But there is development in 
them. At first the men are all unsympathetic. Then 
in " Valentine " the husband becomes at least polished, 
the lover noble, generous, attractive, while the woman 
remains still Madame Dudevant. Here, too, we find 
the first traces of that power of picturesque descrip- 
tion of nature that did not reach its full development 
till toward the close of her second period. Then, in 
her third novel, " Jacques," she is ready to preach the 
gospel of free love, convinced that the restraints of 
marriage are unfavorable to the conservation of pas- 
sion, and admiring the magnanimity of a husband 
who will make way for a lover by suicide. Wild as 
this tale is, it was the herald of a long train of similar 
novels both in France and Germany, and is as impor- 
tant for the evolution of fiction as " Antony " for that 
of the drama. 

The climax of this period however is marked by the 

1 See p. 359, note. 



MODERN FICTION. — EVOLUTION OF NATURALISM. 401 

gloomy, restless despair of " L^lia," whose wild un- 
reasoning eloquence shows that for the time its author 
had lost faith not only in marriage but in love itself 
and even in life. Yet the book seems to have freed 
her bosom of the perilous stuff that preyed upon 
her heart, and from this time she grew more recon- 
ciled to the world. " Leone Leoni " may place pas- 
sion above reason, but it marks her first serious 
attempt at psychological analysis ; and when, in 1836, 
a legal separation from her husband restored to some 
extent her fortune, travel and new experiences were 
reflected in stories with a wider range of interest. 
" Mauprat " shows growing power in the delineation 
of character, while " Andr£ " touches the pastoral 
vein from which she afterward drew the richest treas- 
ures of her genius. 

Her free Bohemian life had brought her in contact 
with many men of genius. Sandeau yielded his place 
to Alfred de Musset, with whom she made a journey 
to Italy, of which each has left a tale of woe. 1 Then 
the socialistic lawyer Michel (de Bourges) claimed her 
enthusiasm,' to be followed by the composer Chopin, 
whose mark may be found on "Consuelo." But in 
1839 she grew weary of this nomad life and a little 
doubtful of her philosophy of individualistic egoism. 
She returned to Nohant, and presently developed into 
a somewhat prosaic chatelaine. Meantime, however, 
her mobile mind had been drawn into Christian So- 
cialistic channels by the enthusiastic Lamennais, as 
well as by miscellaneous and ill-digested reading of 
the philosophers of the eighteenth century. In 1837 
the resigned optimism of the " Letters to Marcia " 

1 He in " Un Merle blanc," she in u Elle et lui," to which the poet's 
brother Paul replied in (i Lui et elle." 

26 



402 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

seemed to mark a radical change from the position of 
" Ldlia " four years before. But in the very next year 
" Spiridion " showed that she had not yet come to 
clearness, for here she recants her recantation, ana 
seeks the solution of the evils of society, not in re- 
ligion but in politics. Now, this involved the aban- 
donment of the Eomantic position, and so inaugurates 
a second period, extending to the Eevolution of 1848, 
during which her books are tinged with a generous 
but ill-defined and illogical socialism. This found 
its extreme expression in the "Meunier d'Angibault," 
where there is a complete fusion of class distinctions ; 
but the most popular novel of the group is " Consuelo," 
the fruit of her long attachment to Chopin, though 
here the political and social speculations are intruded 
rather than essential. 

One may pass briefly over these years in which 
George Sand was little more than the echo, sometimes 
the distorted echo, of such nebulous thinkers as Jean 
Eeynaud, Barbfes, and Pierre Leroux. Her socialism led 
her, however, to take many of her characters from the 
artisan and peasant classes, that, till then, had been 
hardly more than parodied in fiction ; but she com- 
bined poetic fancy with minute observation, and so 
produced " Jeanne " and " La Mare au diable," natu- 
ralistic idyls that mark an important step in the 
divorce of fiction from the lyric spirit of Eomanticism, 
while at the same time they widened the sphere of 
the novel for the ultra Eomanticists of socialism, Sue 
and Hugo. But this phase of her productivity was 
interrupted by the Eevolution, which recalled her for 
a time to politics and to journalism under the auspices 
of Ledru-Bollin. Yet the experiences of May and 
June cooled the enthusiasms of February. They re- 



MODERN FICTION. — EVOLUTION OF NATURALISM. 403 

stored her to literature, where she was now to develop 
her third, the pastoral, manner. 

Her studies of the peasantry of Berry are probably 
George Sand's most permanent contribution to litera- 
ture. They show a feeling for nature, exquisite and till 
then unparalleled in French fiction. Delicate in style, 
admirable in composition, deeply poetic, yet simply 
realistic, " La Mare au diable," " Francois le champi," 
" La Petite Fadette," and most original of all, " Les 
Maitres sonneurs," have the perpetual charm that 
belongs to every union of truth and beauty. Still, this 
vein, however rich, could not be worked indefinitely. 
The pastoral gradually gave place to dramatic at- 
tempts, one of which, " Le Marquis de Villemer," in 
which she had the collaboration of Dumas fils, had 
much success. Meantime, however, from the pastoral 
and the drama she was developing her fourth manner, 
where, with mind and taste clarified by age, she re- 
tains the idyllic tone and the country scene, but adds 
to the delicate delineation of character a fuller in- 
trigue, richer life, and greater variety of situation. 1 
Her pen was tireless, and till she was past seventy she 
continued to do her daily task. The principal interest 
of the last decade, however, centres in her " Journal " 
during the German war, and in her letters, especially 
those to Flaubert, for these throw most interesting 
light on her critical ideas and literary methods. 

Her view of the novelist's art made it essentially the 
expression of lyric passion. " Nothing is strong in 

1 Typical of the period are u Mile. Merquem," " Mile, de la Quin- 
tinie," " Le Marquis de Villemer," and " Jean de la Roche," the scenes 
of which are laid respectively in Normandy, Savoy, the Velay, and 
Auvergne. Characteristic also are " Legendes rustiques " and 
" Marianne." 



404 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

me," she said, " but the necessity of love ; " and when 
this is in question, she will be thoroughly Eomantic, 
however realistic she may be elsewhere. Her passion 
varies, however. It is at first personal, then social and 
humanitarian. Her central impulse is always an emo- 
tion, not an idea, and this is reflected in the composi- 
tion of her novels, where she is apt to conceive her 
situation and " let her pen trot " with no clearly de- 
fined goal. So the beginning of each story is apt to 
be the best, and the body of the work better than its 
close, which occurs, not from any structural necessity, 
but only because the subject has written itself out in 
her mind, from which, indeed, she was wont to let it 
pass so completely that if she chanced to read her own 
novels after an interval, she found she could not recall 
so much as the names of the characters. 

This composition at hap-hazard, finishing one novel 
and beginning another on the same evening, was sus- 
tained by a fertile imagination that loved to cradle 
itself in a rosy optimism. She delighted in " superior 
beings," in whose magnanimity, gentleness, and pas- 
sionate devotion the glowing sympathies of her heart 
alone found satisfaction. Hence her heroes and hero- 
ines become less real, and so attract us less than the 
more genuine creatures of earth that surround them. 
And here, curiously enough, her strength is just where 
Balzac, her greatest contemporary, is weakest, — in the 
aristocracy and in her young girls. "You write the 
' Com^die humaine,' " she says to him ; " I should like 
to write the 6pop£e, the eclogue of humanity." For 
such real flesh and blood girls as hers, we must go 
back to Marivaux if not to Molikre. " Not the child 
nor the young wife, but the budding woman, naive, 
gentle, timid, with her ingenuous coquetries, her comic 



MODERN FICTION. — EVOLUTION OF NATURALISM. 405 

little vexations, her timorous ventures, her invincibly 
romantic disposition, and her constant bashfulness at 
showing it, her long, silent hopes, and discreet waiting, 
the tempestuous heart and the calm face ; all that 
little world so thrilling, so concentrated, so manifold. 
All fail here, and George Sand, too, sometimes, but not 
always." 2 

She thought herself "extremely feminine in the 
inconsequence of her ideas and absolute lack of logic." 
But she was sensible, though not profound. The 
Eomantic girls who took her heroines literally got no 
comfort from her. " L^lia is not I," she writes to one 
of them ; " I am a better woman than that. It is only 
a poem, not a doctrine." She could not have spoken 
more truly. She is pre-eminently the poet among the 
novelists of the century. Standing between the Eo- 
mantic novel of adventure and the realistic study of 
manners, between Dumas and Balzac, she renews the 
idyl, wins back the lyric from its extreme individualism, 
unites poetry to reality, and, if she left few descend- 
ants in France to walk in her via media, the seeds she 
scattered found fruitful soil in England, and especially 
in Bussia, whence they were brought back in the last 
generation to win a wide acceptance that was an augury 
of the approaching revival of her own popularity. 

More connected with the beginnings of Bomanticism 
than George Sand, yet more sharply differentiated 
from it, both in his literary methods and in his aims, 
is Henri Beyle, or Stendhal, as he preferred to call 
himself. He can hardly be ranked among great novel- 
ists, unless the keenest analysis of character alone 
give that rank ; he was never popular, and probably 
never will be. Yet his influence is not to be measured 

1 Faguet, xix. siecle, p. 403. 



406 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

by the number of his readers, for, like the Goncourt 
Brothers, he has been read, admired, and studied by those 
more popular writers who gave to the fiction of the 
second Empire its character, while through them and 
by his own work, his influence has been continued to 
our own day. 

Beyle's l childhood was irritated by misdirected 
piety or its pretence, and so he became in youth a 
disciple of the Materialists ; but at seventeen the 
Napoleonic campaigns drew him into the active army, 
where he learned a passionate love of Bonaparte that 
he was to display boldly in after days when such sen- 
timents were neither popular nor prudent. He served 
the Emperor in Italy and Germany, and followed him 
to Eussia ; but ill health had constrained him to leave 
the army before Napoleon's first abdication, and he 
watched with philosophic calm the strange course of 
the Hundred Days. Milan had long been his favorite 
city, and here he lived till he was expelled by the Aus- 
trian police in 1821. He remained in Italy, however, 
except for a few brief visits to Paris, until his death. 

This expatriation only symbolized the moral and lit- 
erary isolation of his mind. His boyhood had given 
him more sympathy with the age of Voltaire than 
with that of Chateaubriand, while his inveterate habit 

1 Born 1783 ; died 1842. Collected works in nineteen volumes, with 
five more of posthumous letters and journals. Principal novels: 
Armance, 1827 ; Le Rouge et le noir, 1831 ; La Chartreuse de Parme, 
1839. 

Criticism: Taine, Essais de critique et d'histoire; Bourget, Psy- 
chologie contemporaine ; Zola, Romanciers naturalistes ; Lemaitre, 
Contemporains, iv. 3; Rod, Stendhal (Grands ecrivains francais) ; 
Cordier, Stendhal raconte par ses amis ; Merimee, Portraits historiques ; 
Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, ix. 301-341 ; Chuquet, Stendhal- 
Beyle ; Huneker, Egoists, pp. 1-65. 



MODERN FICTION. — EVOLUTION OF NATURALISM. 407 

of anxious introspection marks a greater affinity with 
the modern Psychologists and Symbolists than with 
his Eomantic contemporaries. So he is claimed as an 
ancestor by men so far apart in the world of letters as 
Taine, Zola, and Bourget, for he shares with them all 
the spirit of relentless analysis. This is a veritable 
instinct with him. The most minute self-examina- 
tions fill his Journal. He confesses his aims with a 
frankness that is often startling, and notes, cynically 
sometimes, what he should have done or left undone 
to attain them. He was, as he is constantly telling 
himself, "different" from his environment, born either 
too early or too late. His contemporaries did not un- 
derstand him. Hardly one of his books could have 
paid the expenses of publication, and it is said that 
his curious essay on " Love," the fruit of persistent 
experiment and analysis, attained the phenomenal sale 
of seventeen copies in eleven years. But now cheap 
and popular as well as luxurious and costly editions 
are published of works that never paid the type-setter, 
and he whom Nisard, the chief literary historian of 
the early part of the century, did not so much as name, 
has the sweepings of his study edited without sifting, 
attracts the critical study of the best minds of France, 
and finds his natural place among " Les Grands dcri- 
vains francais." 

His literary work began with a volume of Italian 
travel and another on Painting in Italy (1817). Five 
years later came the striking essay on "Love" and 
" Eacine and Shakspere," a welcome aid to the ad- 
vance guard of Eomanticism. Again five years and 
his first novel, " Arrnance," is offered to an indifferent 
public. Four years later appeared " Le Eonge et le noir," 
a study of the results of the Eestoration on the youth of 



408 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

France, thought by the Naturalists to be his master- 
piece, probably because those not of that coterie have 
preferred "La Chartreuse de Parme " (1839). He left 
also an unfinished novel of which the fragment gives 
promise that it might have been his best. 

The long intervals that separate these works justify 
Zola's remark that to judge Stendhal from himself his 
work was the accident of his existence. He was 
always posing as a literary dilettante, not as an author. 
He was not a close student, and he had not a philo- 
sophic mind, but he used with skill the information 
that came in his way, and he had a happy faculty of 
making the shallow seem deep. There was in him a 
little of the dandy, a good deal of the soldier, and he 
would have been glad if there had been more of the Don 
Juan. In religion he continued always a thorough- 
going disciple of Helv^tius and Condillac ; that is, he 
was an optimistic atheist of a genus now happily 
extinct. As a critic, his blunders were cyclopean, sur- 
passed only by his monumental self-complacency. He 
tells us in his Journal that he is resolved to get the 
reputation of the greatest poet of France, " not by in- 
trigue like Voltaire, but by deserving it. Therefore," 
continues the youth of twenty, " I must learn Greek, 
and not form my taste on the model of my predecessors." 
A little later he is pleased to record " my proud bearing," 
" my charming grace," and " the reflection a la Molifere 
that I made at that moment." He admires " the in- 
imitable physiognomy of my conversation." Surely 
facile fatuousness never went further; and yet this man 
had keener powers of psychic analysis than any other 
writer of his generation. But this appears chiefly in 
his novels, to whose character and influence we may 
now fitly confine our attention. 



MODERN FICTION. — EVOLUTION OF NATURALISM. 409 

Yet even in his^ fiction the reader must be warned 
to expect little from a writer who says that he " reads 
the Code every morning to catch the tone," and catches 
it so faithfully as to make his work from this point of 
view " detestable " in the eyes of Sainte-Beuve. His 
sole interest is in the analysis of the states of soul of 
himself, of his friends, of the creations of his fancy; and 
he makes it because he is convinced that if he will but 
study them closely enough he can spy out the secret Qf 
happiness. Hence his eagerness has little of the objec- 
tivity of the modern school. He is always present in 
his work, commenting on his characters, as Thackeray 
loved to do and as Zola or Bourget would not. And he 
is differentiated from the moderns in another important 
matter. In his analysis of thoughts and sentiments 
he neglected, as the psychology of his time did also, 
the influence of external conditions, and so he leaves 
half unfulfilled his declared purpose " to make his 
novels a mirror which as you carry it along the street 
lets all sorts of images be reflected in it as chance 
directs. ,, But curiously or perversely, it is precisely 
this lack of definite environment that he criticises in 
French classical tragedy, of which he thinks it one of 
the chief faults " to forget that there is no sensibility 
(that is, no power of arousing sympathetic emotion) 
without details." 

In all his novels the one subject of analysis is the 
various forms of restlessness into which the fall of 
Napoleon had thrown a generation brought up to 
action and quick decision, trained to seek and to expect 
a life filled with violent emotions and vaulting ambi- 
tions, and cast now, their occupation gone, on the piping 
times of the Eestoration. How shall this pent up 
energy and passion find a vent ? is the question that 



410 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

all his heroes are set to answer, from " Armance " to 
the posthumous "Lamiel." Stendhal had a sort of 
worship of energy and passion. It is this that makes 
the Italy of the sixteenth century particularly dear to 
him. He thought it high praise to call Napoleon a 
descendant of the condottieri. It was for their uncon- 
trollable passion that Italian women found especial 
favor in his eyes. He felt more at home in Milan 
than in Paris, and composed for himself the Italian 
epitaph: "Here lies Henri Beyle, Milanese. He 
lived, wrote, and loved." 

In a very discriminating essay the pontiff of Natu- 
ralism once called Stendhal 1 "the father of us all." 
An examination of his novels will show how far and 
how he merits the title. When " Armance " describes 
itself as " some scenes from a Parisian salon in 1827," 
it promises a realistic study of social types, but the 
book brings us immediately and exclusively into the 
company of those exceptional beings that alone attract 
Stendhal, just as they did Taine, because in them all 
psychological processes appear magnified. Through- 
out his hero and heroine seem afraid of becoming 
the dupes each of the other, just as Stendhal himself 
spent his life in self-tormenting dread of being the 
victim of his friends and of the conventions of society. 
The interest in these people who morbidly shrink from 
their mutual love lies solely in the minute photography 
of their changing thoughts and feelings. The curiosity 
that they awaken in the reader is, as Zola says, like 
that of a child who holds a watch to his ear to hear it 
tick. But while as a novel the book is undeniably 
hard reading, the analysis of motive was executed with 
an acuteness wholly new in fiction. 

1 Zola, Romanciers naturalistes, p. 124. 



MODERN FICTION. — EVOLUTION OF NATURALISM. 411 

Of far more significance in the evolution of fiction is 
" Le Eouge et le noir," whose protagonist Julien Sorel is a 
great and typical creation. His career, though founded 
in fact, 1 is a veritable breviary of hypocrisy that 
throws no little light on dark corners of Stendhal's 
own character. The energies that would have won 
Julien promotion and glory in the army of Napoleon 
may not " fust in him unused," but find in the church 
the only avenue of rapid promotion and social dis- 
tinction. In his wider purpose to make his book a 
" chronicle of the nineteenth century/' a realistic study 
of Parisian society, Stendhal failed because he had 
neither the knowledge nor the sympathy of Balzac. 
But in intent " Le Bouge et le noir " is a forerunner of 
the "Comddie humaine ;" and if he did not give a true 
picture of society, he did render with the keenest analy- 
sis a state of mind common to the French youth of the 
Bestoration, and in Julien he showed the world what 
he himself wished to be thought to be and in some 
measure was, "the strangest mixture conceivable of 
originality, natural and acquired, of sincerity and pose, 
of clairvoyance and illusion, of dissimulation and reck- 
lessness." The very wrecking of the hypocrite's life 
at the close through the unconquerable impulse of 
passion is only an illustration of Stendhal's view that 
passion is, and ought to be, the supreme arbiter of 
destiny. Julien's execution is his apotheosis. 

Though skilful in the dissection of motives, a Le Bouge 
et le noir " is careless in style and slovenly in construc- 
tion. The action is constantly suspended or delayed, 
while the author belabors the brains of his characters, 
till the reader is in danger of a sympathetic headache. 

1 It is based on facts brought out at the trial of a theological stu- 
dent, Berthelet of Besancon. 



412 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

The modern psychological school, Bourget and his fel- 
lows, may find their method anticipated in the account 
of Julien's seminary life, and of his reflections in the 
condemned cell, which it is curious to contrast with 
Hugo's nearly contemporary " Dernier jour d'un con- 
damnd." The Naturalists see their process reflected in 
Julien's relations to Mathilde and her father, in which 
there are touches worthy of Flaubert. But as a whole 
the characters are too " different," as Stendhal would 
say, from ordinary mortals to suit the disciples of Zola ; 
and Bourget justly sees in " Le Kouge et le noir," as 
well as in " La Chartreuse de Parme," forerunners of 
the new psychologic fiction. 

But " La Chartreuse de Parme " is indeed all things 
to all men. Its best-known episode, the battle of 
Waterloo, strongly recalls the finest work of Zola. 
Bourget may discern his method once more in the 
development of the character of Fabrice, who is in 
many respects a retouching of Julien, essaying the 
church on the collapse of the empire, but ending his 
life of adventure in an archiepiscopal see ; and both 
these elements are combined with a strong dose of 
Eomantic passion and so-called " local color." Here 
the minute dissection of motive alternates with duels, 
dungeons, poisons, and hair-breadth 'scapes, that sug- 
gest without equalling Hugo or Dumas, and import 
into the Italy of Bonaparte the untamed passions of 
the Borgias. The characters are still " different ; " but 
the author threw himself into his work with more 
sympathetic interest, and gave French fiction its first 
serious study of foreign life. 

An unfinished fragment, " Le Chasseur vert," prom- 
ised more than Stendhal had yet realized in fiction, 
though the general theme remains the same. Indeed, 



MODERN FICTION. — EVOLUTION OE NATURALISM. 413 

it seems as though -in his four novels the author had 
undertaken to project his own condition into four dif- 
ferent environments. " What would Henri Beyle have 
become if he had been an aristocrat ? " he asks in 
" Armance." " What if he had been a plebeian, or an 
Italian cadet ? " he inquires of himself in " Le Eouge et 
le noir " and the "Chartreuse." And in his last novel 
he thinks himself of the aristocracy of wealth, the son 
of a banker, who for sheer ennui enters the army, 
though he knows it has little to offer save garrison 
routine. A realistic study of this life, with a faint 
background of clerical and political intrigue, is all that 
remains of " Le Chasseur vert." 

It would be difficult to resume better the general 
impression that Stendhal leaves on the modern reader 
than is done at the close of Zola's striking essay. 
Stendhal, he says in effect, is great when his logic 
applies itself to incontestable facts of human nature, 
but he is only a dilettante of nature when he puts his 
superior and " different " characters on the rack. He 
introduced analysis into French fiction, and in it he 
was exquisite and unique, but he lacked the broad 
human sympathy of the great romancers. Life is 
more simple than he made it. Hence he founded no 
school, though his work was admired and studied by 
Balzac and Mdrim^e. The moment of his greatest in- 
fluence on French letters was, as he had prophesied 
with curious foresight, in 1880, when the more thought- 
ful men of letters were beginning to turn from the 
false and dogmatic Naturalism of Zola, with his persis- 
tent mockery of " metaphysical jumping-jacks," of " the 
continuous and exclusive study of the functions of the 
cerebrum," and his cynical question, " What became 
of the nobility of the brain when the belly was sick ? " 



414 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

Men who shrank from these ethics of the dust saw in 
Stendhal the possibility of a psychological naturalism, 
and for a time Bourget and his most brilliant followers 
studied Stendhal, till they came to assimilate and 
reproduce his very phrases and characters. 1 

Far the greatest figure, however, in the fiction of this 
period is Honors de Balzac, 2 the tragic story of whose 
life is in some measure involved in any effort to measure 
his genius. He was three years older than Hugo, and 
was trained as a lawyer, but no discouragement could 
divert him from literature. To procure resources that 
might enable him to give himself wholly to letters, he 
embarked in speculations that left him in financial 
straits from which his improvidence never permitted 
him wholly to extricate himself. Determined to win 
his livelihood by his pen, he practised his hand in 
youthful romances with which he wisely refused to 
burden his future reputation, and at thirty began the 
great series of his "Comedie humaine," though that 

1 Cp. Rod, Stendhal, p. 151. 

2 Born 1799; died 1850. (Euvres, twenty-four or fifty-five volumes, 
beside two of correspondence and additional letters first published in 
" Revue de Paris," from February, 1894, to March, 1895. Of the fifty- 
five volumes above, ten are occupied by youthful tales, three by the 
" Contes drolatiques," and two by dramas. The rest contain the 
" Comedie humaine," of which there is also an edition in forty-seven 
volumes with a valuable index to characters appended to each work. 

Bibliography : Louvenjoul, Histoire des GEuvres de H. de Balzac. 
Biography : Ferry, Balzac et ses amis ; Wormeley, Memoir of Balzac ; 
Brunetiere, Honore de Balzac. Criticism : Taine, Nouveaux essais 
de critique et d' histoire ; Faguet, xix. siecle ; Zola, Romanciers 
naturalistes ; Flat, Essais sur Balzac, 2 vols. ; Sainte-Beuve, Portraits 
contemporains, i. 432, and Causeries, v. 443. A convenient dictionary 
of characters is: Cerfbeer et Christophe, Repertoire de la Comedie 
humaine (reviewed in France, Vie litteraire, i. 145). Abstracts of 
plots may be found in the otherwise valueless Barriere, L'CEuvre de 
Balzac. Louvenjoul, op. cit. p. 382, reprints an order for reading 
the novels suggested by Alphonse Boule. 



MODERN FICTION. — EVOLUTION OF NATURALISM. 415 

title was not given to it till 1843, nor the plan of con- 
necting the novels at all conceived till the task was 
well advanced (1833). 

Even this maturer work was produced under pres- 
sure, and often betrays the fact, though the Correspond- 
ence alone reveals the constant harassing under which 
his great genius labored, and shows how few bright 
rays came to lighten his life. He had not even the 
consolation of unchallenged recognition of his talent, 
for he had never been willing to crook the pregnant 
hinges of the knee to a venal press, and those who had 
praised a Les Chouans," his first acknowledged story, 
received with studied injustice far stronger works of an 
author who roused both their envy and their fear. 
This stung him to a scathing exhibition of the degra- 
dation of Parisian journalism, and after the appearance 
of " Les Illusions perdues " there was almost a conspir- 
acy to hinder the wide circulation of his books and the 
general recognition of his genius. Yet Balzac was 
well paid according to the standards of the time. He 
could have discharged his debts and laughed at his 
detractors, but he never acquired habits of methodical 
economy, he travelled freely and even extravagantly, 
doubled the cost of his publishing by erratic methods 
of composition and correction, and so, largely by his 
own fault, lived and died in daily dread of the " privy 
paw" of the sheriff. 

The fundamental materialism of his strongly devel- 
oped character was stamped on features that are said 
to have resembled those of Nero, and found still fur- 
ther expression in a huge frame that resisted for years 
anxieties and labors that seem almost incredible. At 
times he wrote eighteen hours a day, and usually twelve 
even when travelling. His letters to the Countess 



416 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

Hanska, afterward his wife, are full of allusions to the 
goading of his fagged mind " in the midst of protested 
bills, business annoyances, the most cruel financial 
straits, in utter solitude and lack of all consolation." * 
But it may well be that just such a spur was essential 
to force his genius to rapid development and steady pro- 
duction. Under more favorable auspices a man of his 
temper would surely have wasted some, perhaps most, 
of his energy on forms of literature to which his tal- 
ent was less suited, such as the drama, for which he 
had always a predilection, or even in commerce and 
politics, with which his books show continual preoccu- 
pation. Circumstances forced his talent along the line 
of least resistance, and so of greatest progress. But 
though he was never free from the spur of anxiety, the 
great tragedy of his life was reserved for its close. 
For sixteen years he had loved the Countess Hanska, 
and when at last all obstacles to their union were 
overcome, Balzac was sinking under the disease that in 
a few months cost him his life. 

The " Com^die humaine " is like a tower of Babel 2 
that the hand of the architect had not and could never 
have had time to finish. Some walls seem ready to 
fall with age. The builder has taken whatever mate- 
rial fell to his hand, plaster, cement, stone, marble, 
even sand and mud from the ditch, and has built his 
gigantic tower without heeding always harmony of 
lines or balanced proportions, mingling with the care- 

1 He says he wrote the first fifty sheets of " Les Illusions perdues" 
in three days, and " La Vieille fille " in the same interval. " La Porte 
brisee," the close of " L'Enfant maudit," was " composed in a few 
hours of moral and physical agony." " The Secret of the Kuggieri," 
" The Atheist's Mass/' and " Facino Cane," each in a single night. 

2 This paragraph follows and in part reproduces a sustained meta- 
phor of Zola, op. cit. p. 3. 



MODERN FICTION. — EVOLUTION OF NATURALISM. 417 

less power of genius^the grandiose and the vulgar, the 
exquisite and the barbarous, the good and the bad. 
And so it remains to-day one of those cyclopean 
monuments, full of splendid halls and wretched cor- 
ners, divided by broad corridors and narrow passages, 
with superpiled stories in varied architecture. You 
may lose your way in it twenty times, and always feel 
that there are still undiscovered miseries and splendors. 
It is a world, a world of human creation, built by a 
marvellous mason who at times was also an artist. 
Time has worn holes in it. A cornice has fallen here 
and there, but the marble stands whitened by time. The 
workman has built his tower with such an instinct of 
the great and eternal that when all the mud and sand 
has been washed away, the monument will still appear 
on the horizon like the silhouette of a city. 

It is impossible here, and unnecessary to our imme- 
diate purpose, to attempt to guide the reader through 
all these corridors and passages, into all the chambers 
of this monument of imagination and industry, that 
Taine did not scruple to call " the greatest storehouse of 
documents on human nature since Shakspere," where 
" the secretary of society," as Balzac loved to call him- 
self, has undertaken " by infinite patience and courage 
to compose for the France of the nineteenth century 
that history of morals that the old civilizations of 
Eome, Greece, and Egypt left untold," to " draw up the 
inventory of its vices and virtues," and to lay bare the 
greed and social ambition that seemed to him the main- 
spring of its multiplex activities. 

The mighty maze of these well-nigh hundred stories 
is divided by Balzac into Scenes of Private Life and of 
Parisian, Provincial, Political, Military, and Country 
Life, to which he appends groups of Analytical and 

27 



418 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

Philosophical Studies ; and it is most fruitful to follow 
this division in a study of his genius, for an attempt 
to place the novels in the order of their internal chro- 
nology would involve an inextricable confusion, and 
little is gained by considering the order in which they 
were written, 1 for this is of less significance with 
Balzac than with most great authors. 

His Scenes of Private Life are naturally stories of 
ideals, illusions, tentative efforts of young men, and 
of ingenuous maidenhood and motherly pride. In 
comparison with his other work the emotion here is 
less strong, and the characters less complex, though 
this section includes some interesting portraits of his 
contemporaries, 2 and a tale of horror, " La Grande 
Breteche," where Balzac's genius shines with a lurid 
glow that is more characteristic of his Parisian novels. 

Provincial Life offered Balzac a broader canvas for 
the more constant and normal types of human nature, 
while Paris naturally fostered the extreme and excep- 
tional. It is in the former environment that the 
" characteristic little facts " of his exact realism appear 

1 This is given in detail in Louvenjoul, op. cit. pp. 315-328. That of 
the masterpieces is: La Peau de chagrin, 1830-1831 ; Jesus Christ en 
Plandre, 1831; Le Colonel Chabert, 1832; Contes drolatiques, 1832, 
1833, 1837; La Grande Breteche, 1832; Le Cure de Tours, 1832; 
Louis Lambert, 1832 ; Eugenie Grandet, 1833 ; Ferragus, 1833 ; La 
Duchesse de Langeais, 1834; Seraphita, 1834; La Recherche de 
Tabsolu, 1834; Le Pere Goriot, 1834; Les Illusions perdues, 1837, 
1839, 1848; Splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes, 1838-1847; Un 
Menage de garcon, 1841-1842; Les Parents pauvres (Cousin Pons, 
Cousine Bette), 1846-1847. 

2 Camille Maupin in " Beatrix " combines the mind of George Sand 
with the exterior of the Romantic actress, Georges, and Claude Vignon 
is apparently Balzac himself. Madame Schonz in the same novel is a 
connecting link between Hugo's "Marion de Lorme"and Augier's 
" Olympe." In " Modeste Mignon," Canalis seems compounded of 
Chateaubriand and Lamartine, though he flatters neither. 



MODERN FICTION. — EVOLUTION OF NATURALISM. 419 

in the most brilliantly minute descriptions, though 
marred at times by diffuse archaeology in their local 
color. It is in his Provincial Scenes, too, that Balzac 
touches most nearly the founder of the new Natural- 
ism, Flaubert. Here the formation of character that 
had been the subject of the previous group gives 
place to the shock of characters already formed, and 
money replaces love as the mainspring of action. 

The finest novel of this group, if not of the whole 
series, is " Eugenie Grandet," whose heroine is Balzac's 
noblest female character, while the book itself is one 
of the most powerful studies of avarice in the literature 
of the world. And hardly second to the psychological 
interest is the graphic power of epic description that 
gives to the misers house and to his strong-room the 
same individualized personality that Zola has bestowed 
on the mine in " Germinal," or the locomotive in " La 
Bete humaine." Each detail of his minute description 
serves to mark a step in the progress of Grandet's 
vice toward monomania. There was in this miser, 
Balzac says, " something of the tiger and of the boa- 
constrictor. He could lie in wait, watch his prey, 
jump on it, — and then opening the jaws of his purse 
he would swallow a pile of ecus, and lie down tran- 
quilly like the serpent in his digestion, impassive, cold, 
methodical." Step by step his passion absorbs his 
whole being, till at the close he is only a paralytic 
maniac, clutching in his death-struggle the crucifix to 
his lips, because it sparkles with gold, and gasping to 
his child the last words : " You will have to give an 
account hereafter to me for all I leave you." 

No other novel in this group approaches " Eugenie 
Grandet ; " but several have a place in the develop- 
ment of fiction. Among these the most striking is the 



420 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

anti-clerical " Cur<3 de Tours," the first of a series of 
tales of like tendency, of , which the chief are Sue's 
" Wandering Jew " and Fabre's " Abb£ Tigrane." One 
sees here what fears seemed justifiable to the Liberals 
of the Eestoration, and one comprehends better the 
over- wrought excitement of Micheiet's lectures on the 
Jesuits. Mesmerism too, which, as recent events show, 
is a ghost not wholly laid, is curiously mingled witli 
the realism of " Ursule Mirouet," and had indeed 
already appeared in the philosophic studies " S^raphita " 
and " Louis Lambert." 1 

But it is by his Parisian Scenes that Balzac exer- 
cised the greatest influence and won the greatest fame. 
" Eugenie Grandet " is the only provincial story that 
will rival in popular regard or critical favor " Le 
Pere Goriot," "Les Parents pauvres," "Les Illusions 
perdues," or "Les Splendeurs et miseres des courti- 
sanes." The general average is higher here, and the 
novels are more closely interlinked by recurring char- 
acters. Some of these are indeed products of a purely 
romantic imagination, such as the Vautrin of the 
" Splendeurs ; " others are the result of minute obser- 
vation, such as Goriot, Eastignac, Kubemprd, or else 
prophetic deductions from incipient social tendencies, 
such as De Marsay, the skeptical blagueur, " who be- 
lieved neither in men nor women, in God nor the 
devil," and both in his character and his career was a 

1 " Un Menage de garcon," from this group, an uneven book with an 
admirable study of shifty Parisian poverty, contains in Joseph Bridau 
a portrait of the artist Delacroix. Among these Provincial Scenes is 
also " Le Lys dans la vallee," which Faguet thinks " the worst novel 
I know." Its style appears to Lanson " a pasty rigmarole/' while 
Barriere regards it as " Balzac's most elaborate study of the psychology , 
of love." It certainly contains some of its author's best descriptive 
work. 



MODERN FICTION. — EVOLUTION OF NATURALISM. 421 

strange anticipation of the Due de Morny. So, too, his 
Madame Marneffe in"" Cousine Bette " is the archetypal 
study of the " Demi-monde," in its original sense, and 
the Esther of the " Splendeurs " anticipates Marguerite 
in the " Dame aux canidlias." Indeed it is not possi- 
ble here even to name all the characters of Balzac's 
Paris that have left their mark on men's minds, so that 
one speaks as familiarly of a Gobseck, a Goriot, a 
Kemonencq, or a Bixiou as one does of a fable of La 
Fontaine or of a character of Eacine. 

As novels of plot the " Splendeurs," " Ferragus," and 
the " Duchesse de Langleais " hold the highest place in 
the " Com^die humaine ; " but the finest psychological 
touches are to be sought rather in " Pkre Goriot " and 
in "Cousine Bette." Yet the short stories in this 
group are also remarkable. " Gobseck," a worthy pen- 
dant to "Eugenie Grandet," contains one of the most 
successful inspirations of the shudder in literature, 
afterward so successfully cultivated by Maupassant, 
and " Le Colonel Chabert " is a masterpiece of powerful 
condensation. Its description of the battle of Eylau 
bears comparison with Mdrim^e's " Prise de la redoute," 
and it might be hard to find elsewhere a more effective 
picture of the dusty purlieus of the law, which Balzac 
says would be the most awful of social boutiques, were 
it not for "the humid sacristies where prayers are 
weighed and sold like groceries, and the second-hand 
dressmakers' shops, whose frippery " blasts all the illu- 
sions of life by showing where its festivals end." In 
his duel with French law the gallant colonel's reason 
fails, and the story leaves him a pathetic, harmless, 
hopeless lunatic. 

This story revealed great powers of military evoca- 
tion, and it seems strange that his Military Scenes 



422 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

should count but one novel, the youthful " Chouans," 
and the curious fragment on animal fascination, " Une 
Passion dans le ddsert." Politics, too, bore a larger 
part in Balzac's speculations than in the " Com^die 
humaine." But there is more of the Christian Socialist 
than of the romancer in " L'Envers de l'histoire con- 
temporaine," or in its country pendant, " Le MMecin 
de campagne." The author's most extreme political 
views are in the study of " Catherine de M^dicis," and 
the story " Z. Marcas ; " but from a literary point of 
view far the finest of the Political Scenes is "Une 
Episode sous la terreur." These sociological essays are 
continued in the Scenes of Country Life, among which 
" Les Paysans " deals with peasant proprietorship in a 
way that might have preserved from his worst error 
the author of " La Terre," while " Le M^decin de cam- 
pagne " is interesting chiefly for its exhibition of the 
way in which the peasants, and perhaps the author, 
regarded the career of the great Napoleon. 

We should naturally look to the Philosophical Studies 
for Balzac's most sustained efforts in the analysis of 
character, which here tends more to the typical, and 
so lends itself peculiarly to moral and social satire. 
Here, too, the mystical element in Balzac's nature finds 
its most unrestrained expression in " Louis Lambert's " 
speculations on the will, the scientific monomania 
of " La Eecherche de l'absolu," or the Swedenborg- 
inspired ecstasies of " S^raphita." Most noteworthy 
in this group is " La Peau de chagrin/ a study of the 
workings of ambition in the hypersensitive nature of 
Eaphael, who struggles in the thorny hedge of reality, 
and discovers too late that " millionaires are their own 
executioners," only to die a victim of fulfilled desire. 
It is curious to contrast the insolent luxury of Taillefer's 



MODERN FICTION. — EVOLUTION OF NATURALISM. 423 

feast in this book with Petronius' classic realism in his 
feast of Trimalchio (Petr. Satyr. 30-78) ; but to the 
thoughtful reader the chief interest of " La Peau de 
chagrin " lies in its epigrammatic scourging of the 
various phases of satiety, always sombre and often 
profound. Among the shorter studies in this group is 
the strangely fascinating "Jfeus Christ en Flandre," 
whose doctrine is : " Ask nothing great from interests, 
for these are transitory. Await all from the senti- 
ments, from religion, and patriotic faith." * 

The so-called Analytical Studies are in reality more 
or less immature satires on marriage, that call for as 
little notice as his dramas, of which " Mercadet " alone 
survives in the repertory of the National Theatre. 
Not so the " Contes drolatiques," which reveal Balzac 
more completely than any other of his works, — the 
splendid animal, full-blooded, expansive, a little heavy, 
a little vulgar, with a Eabelaisian plainness of speech 
and "laughter shaking both his sides," with more 
delight in Gallic than in Attic salt. Here, and per- 
haps here only, where he lets himself go and throws 
off all artificial constraint, his style becomes at times 
admirable for its own sake. It must be recognized, 
however, that the " Contes " are as ill adapted for gen- 
eral reading as " Pantagruel," and that fact has barred 
them from some editions and most translations of 
Balzac's works. 

1 This group shows in " Melmoth " the influence of Goethe's 
"Faust;" in " Gambara " and "Massimila Doni " that of Stendhal. 
Hawthorne has imitated " L'Elixir de longue vie," Zola's " L'CEuvre " 
contains exactly the thesis of " Le Chef d'oeuvre inconnu," Ohnet has 
taken from " Les Marana " the climax of " Serge Panine," and Augier 
a part of his " Maitre Guerin" from "La Recherche de l'absolu." 
The shudder in literature may be felt again in " El Verdugo," and 
the battle-scene in "L'Adieu" rivals that in "Le Colonel Chabert." 



424 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

If, now, we try to resume the characteristics, ajid 
to gain a final impression of Balzac's monumental 
work that may serve to fix his place in the literature 
of the century, we shall be struck rather with the 
robust fulness of his mind, the feverish activity of 
his imagination, than by the adequacy of the expres- 
sion that he gave to it. Ideas never failed him, but 
he had sometimes " the vertigo of his own imagina- 
tion.*' He occasionally obscured his thought by an 
obtrusion of learning, or warped it by prejudices 
that we associate with vulgar minds. His trenchant 
and heavy satire is seldom enlivened by the play 
of wit, for he takes his task most seriously, sure that 
he is " a guiding light, or at least a physician who 
gravely feels the pulse of the century." So by his 
zeal to tell us not only what he sees, but what he 
thinks about it, he misses the objectivity of the later 
Naturalists. They are consistent philosophic deter- 
minists and pessimists. He is by turns a cynical 
materialist and a visionary mystic. 

Balzac had to a remarkable degree the power of 
seeing things in detail. Each face had to him its 
distinctive feature, and he preferred an individual- 
ized portrait to an idealized beauty. In a similar 
way he specialized inanimate objects. But in both 
cases the vividness of the image sometimes hid from 
the author the associations it might evoke in the 
reader; hence arise lapses of taste even more gro- 
tesque than Hugo's, especially when he attempts to be 
delicate or sentimental. For he leaves no class of 
fiction untried. With Protean deftness he becomes 
by turns a genuine romantic romancer, in the style 
of Anne Radcliffe, an elegiac and mystic romancer, an 
admirable realistic novelist, and occasionally so grossly 



MODERN FICTION. — EVOLUTION OF NATURALISM. 425 

and violently realistic that he ceases to be realistic at 
all. 1 There are times when Balzac seems a caterer who 
has undertaken to furnish whatever the public desires, 
in the style that it prefers, from the country idyl to 
the detective story. But one always feels that he 
is more at home with Madame Marneffe than with 
S^raphita. His Eomantic side was the result of envi- 
ronment. It shows least of his individuality and 
genius. He endures by his power of minute observa- 
tion, by his ability to paint men and things in such 
detail as to make them more real to his readers than 
their own superficial impressions. We feel that had 
Grandet or Goriot been our neighbors they would be 
less understood, less individual to us, than Balzac has 
made them. 

Of course, such a talent shows itself to best advan- 
tage in that social sphere with which both author and 
reader are most in touch and sympathy, that is, with 
the bourgeoisie, or, again, with such classes as are most 
under the dominance of environment and circum- 
stance, that is, with artisans and laborers as well as 
with the grossly materialistic and criminal. " Vulgar 
natures/' Balzac writes to George Sand, "interest me 
more than they do you. I magnify them, idealize 
them inversely in their ugliness or folly," giving them 
sometimes "horrible or grotesque proportions. " This 
distortion of naturalism is with him, as with Zola, the 
result of inferring character from action. His observa- 
tion is correct, but the constructive psychology that 
he bases on it is faulty, and his conclusions are exag- 
gerated. 2 His world becomes a struggle for money 
and place, in which all tender sentiments are withered, 

1 Cp. Faguet, op. cit. pp. 417-420, which is here closely followed. 

2 This is essentially the conclusion of Faguet, op. cit. pp. 434-437. 



426 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

or saved as by fire. Balzac's experience of the world 
made him skeptical. He had seldom seen strength 
combined with the gentler virtues. His good men 
and women — Pons, Schniucke, Henrietta, Madame 
Bridau — are victims of their own simple-heartedness, 
the natural prey of the Marneffes, the Philippes, and 
the Kemonencqs. 

The " Comddie humaine " counts in Cerf beer's Eeper- 
tory two thousand actors. Of these many only cross 
the stage, others are but the stuff that dreams are made 
of, but a great number remain that have an individuality 
of flesh and blood. Most of these, however, like the per- 
sonages of Dickens, are simpler than nature, characters 
in La Bruykre's sense, not balanced studies like those 
of Stendhal or of the modern psychological school. 
They are centred around some trait, and since they 
admit of no psychic conflict, they lack the interest that 
comes of moral victory or defeat. When occasionally 
Balzac attempts to exhibit such an inner struggle, he 
does but show his limitations, yet none has rendered bet- 
ter than he the great conflict of classes in the transition 
between the aristocratic and the democratic regime. 
None saw so clearly as he the social significance of the 
revolution in land tenure that resulted from the sale 
of the confiscated domain in the early years of the 
Bepublic, nor the disintegrating fermentation that fol- 
lowed the dispersion of the Grande Arm^e. 1 

Among Balzac's contemporaries George Sand owed 
the inspiration, though not the development, of her 
studies of nature and country life to his example. In 
the *next generation his realistic observation served as 
a guide to the early efforts of Flaubert. Through him 
in his minute observation, and directly in his essen- 

N 1 Cp. Faguet, 1. c. pp. 424-433. 



MODEKN FICTION. — EVOLUTION OF NATURALISM. 427 

tially Eomantic exaggeration, Balzac has been a power 
with all the later 'doctrinaire Naturalists, but the 
Psychological School owes less to his method or ex- 
ample than to those of Stendhal. 

It remains to speak of Merimee, 1 who curiously 
unites the characteristics of Sand, Stendhal, and Bal- 
zac. He had the essentially pessimistic and sombre 
observation of the author of the " Com^die humaine," 
the picturesque power but not the eighteenth-century 
buoyancy of Sand, and he shared with Stendhal a keen 
psychological insight and a morbid dread of being 
deceived into a show of sympathy where none was 
due. But to all this he joined what none of them pos- 
sessed, — a high-bred, impassive, aristocratic calm. He 
was always courteous and obliging, often even to the 
extent of sacrifice, 2 but always on the watch to restrain 
any expression of emotional interest or expansion of 
heart. Hence in his writing he cultivated the most 
absolute impersonality, and this was his most impor- 
tant contribution to the following generation. 

M^rim^e was but twenty-two when in the exuber- 
ance of youth he imposed on the exotic taste of a con- 
fiding public his " Theatre de Clara Gazul " as a bit of 

1 Born 1803; died 1870. He was Inspector of Historical Monuments 
from 1831, and Senator from 1853, having been personally attached to 
the family of Empress Eugenie. Chronology of his principal works : 
Theatre de Clara Gazul, 1825 ; La Guzla, 1826 ; La Jacquerie, 1828 ; Le 
Chronique de Charles IX., 1829. Short stories, — among them Ta- 
mango, La Venus d'llle, Matteo Falcone, Colomba, 1830-1841 ; Essai 
sur la guerre sociale, 1841 ; Carmen, 1847 ; Les Faux Demetrius, 1854; 
Melanges historiques et litteraires, 1855. Four volumes of letters 
have been posthumously published. 

Criticism : Filon, Merimee et ses amis ; D'Haussonville, Merimee 
(reviewed by France, Vie litteraire, ii. 47) ; Faguet, xix. siccle ; Lan- 
son, p. 987 ; and Fortnightly Review, December, 1890. Of historic 
interest is Sainte-Beuve, Portraits contemporains, ii. 361. 

2 See Revue bleue, January, 1895. ' 



428 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

ultra-Spanish dramatic art, and that with such success 
that he repeated the mystification two years later in 
the pseudo-Illyrian poems of " La Guzla." Years 
afterward Mdrimde explained the spirit in which these 
two books were written. He says that he and his 
Eomantic brethren then thought " there was no salva- 
tion without local color/' by which they understood 
the study of manners. Hence in poetry they admired 
only the foreign and the ancient. Scotch Border Bal- 
lads or the " Romancero of the Cid " seemed incompar- 
able masterpieces. So, in order to get money to study 
foreign manners, Mdrimde conceived the idea of evolv- 
ing them from his imagination. He read such travels 
as came to hand and an opportune government report, 
" learned five or six words of Slavonic, and wrote the 
collection of ballads in a fortnight," so easily that he 
came to doubt the saving grace of " local color " after 
all, the more perhaps as certain learned German lit- 
terati, unwarned by their experience with Ossian, had 
discovered in these pretended translations valuable 
contributions to folk-lore, and even traces of the prim- 
itive Dalmatian metres, until at last the simple ana- 
gram of Guzla and Gazul dawned on their minds, and 
diverted their philological acumen to less obviously 
fruitless labors. 

From " La Guzla " M^rimde turned to mediaeval 
France, from the exotic to the semi-barbaric, and from 
poetry to prose. He wrote of the Peasants' War, of the 
Massacre of St. Bartholomew, and in " La Famille de 
Carvajal " pushed, perhaps for the only time, fantastic 
horror beyond the border line of good taste. None of 
these stories, however, equalled in concentrated power 
the half-dozen pages of " La Redoute," one of the most 
finished battle pictures in literature ; nor did they rival 



MODERN FICTION. — EVOLUTION OF NATURALISM. 429 

the grim horror of " Tamango," more ghastly than any- 
fancy of Poe, or of the most morose of modern pes- 
simists, and all the more grewsome because of the 
writer's ironic calm. " One must be humane," says 
the proprietor of the slave-ship to his outfitter. " We 
ought to leave a negro at least five feet by two to 
enjoy himself during a transit of six weeks or more. 
After all, they are men, like the whites.' , In other 
stories of this period * one feels oppressed by the fatal- 
ism of crime; and to this the "Venus of Ille " adds 
an element of demonology of which there is indeed 
a touch in all Marinade's conceptions of love. 

Historical and antiquarian studies now divided his 
interest, but he turned his travels to literary account in 
" Colomba " and " Carmen," the latter probably still 
the most successful treatment of the Spanish gypsy, 
the former surely the best expression of the Corsi- 
can spirit, of its rough and ready justice, its sturdy 
independence and fierce feuds. Until the " Mariage 
de Loti," " Colomba/' in spite of its brevity, for it counts 
but two hundred pages, was without a rival in French 
fiction for its rendering of primitive emotions and 
exotic life. 

M£rim£e chose for his device the Greek motto " Ke- 
member to doubt." All his work breathes a profound 
disillusion. One feels this in the mystifications of the 
"Gazul" and the "Guzla," in the quizzical endings 
that end nothing of the " Chronicle " and of the care- 
fully elaborated " Venus of Ille," and most of all in 
his indifference either to his own fame or to the gen- 
uineness of the impression that his work produces. 
Now, such an attitude is hardly professional, and per- 
haps it is not unjust to say that Mdrimde was always 

1 E. g., La Partie de tric-trac, La Vase etrusque, Matteo Falcone. 



430 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

essentially an amateur, whether in literature, in art, 01 
in archaeology. He has himself said that in the arts 
one can excel only by entire surrender to them, but 
that, he continues, " would make one a little bete" and 
bete he was resolved on no account to be. 

Mdrimde's interest, like Stendhal's, lies rather in men 
than in things. Scenes he will seldom describe save 
for their immediate effect on the action. Then, indeed, 
he does it admirably. Like Stendhal again, he affects 
situations and characters that give free play to pas- 
sion, but he differs from him radically in the precise 
concision of his style. If the scenes of his tales are 
for the most part foreign or strange, M^rimde is still 
a thorough realist. His Spanish gypsy girl seems 
wholly natural to her environment, and we feel that 
the environment itself is true to a nature, though not 
to ours. So, too, he has the art to persuade us that 
his Colomba is the natural product of Corsican training 
and traditions, and we feel that if somewhere out of our 
range of vision there are outlaws, smugglers, untamed 
men and women, then this will be a true picture of 
that " border-land between culture and savagery." 

But, in spite of the impersonality he cultivates, 
M£rim£e's naturalism is tinged with an ironical pes- 
simism. While the reader, with more faith than he in 
Mother Nature, is looking for some tender sentiment, 
he will unveil a ghastlier horror, or perhaps express a 
regret that " assassination is no longer one of our 
social usages." Civil war, murder, treachery, or 
some power not ourselves that makes for evil, lies at 
the base of all his fiction, though toward the end this 
tone is subordinated to the growing severity of his 
taste. 1 He never ceased, however, " to despise men too 

1 It hardly tinged " Arsene Guillot." 



MODERN FICTION. — EVOLUTION OF NATURALISM. 431 

much to have faith in their progress ; " and so he, more 
even than Balzac, promoted the pessimistic weakening 
of the will that marks a considerable section of the 
literature of the fin de siecle. 

The language of Mdrim^e is singularly limpid and 
pure, simple and remarkable for its sober condensa- 
tion. It has been compared to a plate of glass through 
which all that he wishes to show, appears, while it leaves 
itself no sensation. But if the attention of the critic 
is concentrated on it one observes beneath the first im- 
pression of perfect ease and naturalness a gradual 
revelation of art, until at last it will seem as though 
all had been subordinated to an aesthetic purpose that 
had produced its full effect while still wholly unrecog- 
nized at the very first reading. Herein lies Mdrimde's 
enduring charm. He is, among the novelists of his 
time, pre-eminently the artist. 



432 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 



CHAPTEE XII. 

MODERN FICTION. — II. THE NATURALISTIC SCHOOL. 

Balzac and his fellows had inaugurated the study of 
contemporary life in fiction ; but both he and they had 
usually been diligent to seek such phases of it as had 
dramatic interest, and to arrange their observations so 
as to heighten this effect. That departure from the 
normal train of daily life was a concession, perhaps a 
fundamentally necessary concession, to Idealism and so 
to Romanticism ; and this it was the endeavor of the 
next generation at all cost to exclude. Now, in so far 
as Naturalism effects a closer and more exact observa- 
tion, a simpler and more robust style, it is the natural 
and healthy reaction from Idealism, for these are the 
two points between which the literary needle has 
swayed since the beginning of literature. But the 
Naturalism of the men we are to consider went much 
further than this. Zola announced his intention " to 
study man as he is, not your metaphysical jumping- 
jack, but the physical man, determined by environ- 
ment, acting under the play of all his organs.'' " What 
a farce," he continues, " is this continuous and exclu- 
sive study of the functions of the brain ! . . . What 
becomes of the nobility of the brain if the belly is 
sick ? " Hence some ardent disciples have jumped at 
the conclusion that the novel was not to be psycho- 
logical but abdominal ; and this certainly is the tendency 
of these " slices of crude life," this topsy-turvy idealism 



1 



MODERN FICTION. — THE NATURALISTIC SCHOOL. 433 

of an art which they have striven to make wholly im- 
personal, unsympathetic, and materialistic, and have at 
least succeeded in making wholly unnatural. It is the 
function of criticism to show that these men who have 
made Naturalism a byword were false Naturalists, and 
that it was because they were false Naturalists, and 
only in so far as they were false Naturalists, that they 
discredited Naturalism in discrediting themselves. 

Flaubert x marks the transition from Eomanticism 
to this phase of materialistic realism. He exhibits 
exceptionally the continuity of literary development 
through reforms and changes that to those who 
preached them seemed radical and revolutionary. Not, 
indeed, that Flaubert ever associated himself with the 
extreme and intolerant claims of the theoretic doc- 
trinaire critics of his school. He was a tolerant ec- 
lectic who combined the qualities of the men of his 
youthful admiration, Hugo and Chateaubriand, with 
those of his own disciples, Zola and Maupassant. 
This gives his work its peculiar interest, and an impor- 
tance greater than its comparatively small bulk might 
suggest. 

Flaubert grew up in the heyday of the Eomantic 
movement, and shared its enthusiasms to the full. Writ- 

1 Bom 1821 ; died 1880. CEuvres, 8 vols., and Correspondance, 4 vols. 
Chronology of the more important novels: Mme. Bovary, 1857; 
Salammbo, 1862; L'Education sentimentale, 1869; La Tentation de 
Saint- Antoine, 1874; Trois contes, 1877; Bouvard et Pecuchet (un- 
finished). 

Criticism: Brunetiere, Roman naturaliste, pp. 29 and 161; Zola, 
Romanciers naturaiistes, pp. 125-223 ; Bourget, Essais, p. Ill ; Tarver, 
Flaubert as seen in his Works and Correspondence; Spronck, Les 
Artistes litteraires, 239 ; Sainte-Beuve, Causeries, xiii. 346 ; Pellissier, 
op. cit. p. 326 ; Lanson, op. cit. p. 1047. Saintsbury, Essays on French 
Novelists, offers a mild antidote to some opinions expressed here and 
in chapters v. and xiii. See also Huneker, Egoists, pp. 104-138. 

28 



434 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

ing of 1840, he says : " Our dreams in college days 
were superbly extravagant, the last full flowering of 
Eomanticism, . . . maintained by a provincial environ- 
ment and making strange ebullitions in our brains. . . . 
We were not only troubadours, rebels, Orientals ; we 
were, more than all, artists. Our school tasks over, 
literature began. We put out our eyes reading novels 
in the dormitory ; we carried daggers in our pockets. . . . 
One of us blew out his brains ; another hung himself 
by his cravat. . . . What hatred we had of the com- 
monplace ; what aspirations to grandeur ; what respect 
for the masters ; how we admired Hugo ! " 1 

Flaubert never lost sight of his Eomantic ideals ; but 
they had fallen on unromantic times, and mocked him 
so constantly that the vulgarity of life became at last 
his all-absorbing thought, and his contempt of the 
bourgeoisie a passionate hatred that he devoted his 
whole life to express in a form whose perfection should 
make it an enduring monument of human pettiness. 
This thought runs like a red thread through all his 
novels, whether the scene be a Norman town or an- 
cient Carthage, the Paris of the Second Eepublic or 
the Egyptian hermitages of the Thebaid. Everywhere 
and always to strive for the ideal is to invite the 
heart-sickness of disillusion. 

Flaubert is then a Eomantic pessimist, — a species 
that has tended not a little to confuse the popular 
conception of pessimism itself. His pessimism is a 
sentiment. " Strange/' he says, " that I was born with 
so little faith in happiness. Even as a boy, I had a 
complete presentiment of life. It was like the smell 
of a nauseating kitchen escaping through a ventilating 
hole. One had no need to taste to know that it was 
1 Condensed from Bourget's citation, 1. c. p. 130. 



MODEKN FICTION. — THE NATURALISTIC SCHOOL. 435 

sickening." If he is to be judged by his fiction, he 
regarded reading, and indeed intellectual progress gen- 
erally, as likely to increase the evils of life. All his 
protagonists are nursed on literature. Books and 
meditation turn the brains of his Saint Antony and of 
his Emma Bovary, his Frdd^ric is the victim of a 
" sentimental education/' and Salammbo has drunk 
deep of the legends of her people. 

This pessimistic cast of mind produced in Flaubert, 
as it often has in others, a passion for formal beauty. 
The union in him of a deep poetic feeling with the 
keen analytic spirit 1 produced a bitter sense of dis- 
proportion between what might be and what is ; and 
this made his literary composition labored and slow to 
a degree that has become proverbial. Six years was 
the average interval between his longer novels, and he 
spent a score in elaborating the " Temptation of Saint 
Antony." He made minute studies, accumulated huge 
masses of notes. For an episode of a few pages he 
might consult a hundred volumes. And he was as 
meticulous in regard to form as to matter. Each para- 
graph was subjected to repeated scrutinies, obtrusive 
relatives were sedulously banished, the recurrence of 
vowel or consonant sounds was sought or avoided, 
and the melody of each sentence tested by loud dec- 
lamation until it was attuned to satisfy his sensitive 
ear. He cited with approval the doctrine of Buffon, 
that "the beauties of style are truths as useful, and 
perhaps more precious, for the public than those con- 
tained in the subject itself ; " and, following to their 
logical conclusion the aesthetics of pessimism, with an 
instinct of harmony that he caught from Chateaubriand, 
he resolved to base a purely objective art on the ruins 

1 Cp. Bourget, op. cit. p. 136. 



436 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

of Eomanticism, 1 and proclaimed the paradox : " Art, 
having its reason in itself, should not be regarded as a 
means," — a view from which he deduced a severely ob- 
jective impersonality in his fiction that differentiated 
it sharply from Eomanticism and made it a model for 
the generation nursed in the scientific determinism of 
Taine. 

For " Madame Bovary " is the illustration in fiction 
of Taine's psychology and literary criticism, and that 
is what gives it its cardinal significance in the evolu- 
tion of the modern novel. Flaubert's characters may 
be, as Bourget has called them, " walking associations 
of ideas ; " but they are not, like the creations of Sten- 
dhal, abstractions projected against space. They are 
psychologically much more superficial, but they are 
fixed in an environment of precise and definite "sig- 
nificant little facts," which are, it must be confessed, 
occasionally surcharged with superfluous erudition. 
Thus Flaubert, more than Chateaubriand and more 
than any of the later Naturalists, combined so much as 
he discerned of psychological reality with its physical 
conditions and manifestations : he illustrated thoughts 
by material images, and systematically substituted 
sensation for feeling, the image for the idea. 2 He 
therefore habitually called on environment to direct 
thought and evoke past experience, and so he intro- 
duced into modern fiction a device that, especially in 
the hands of Daudet, has added greatly to the rapidity 
with which the action of a novel may be developed. 

Flaubert also parted company with Eomantic meth- 
ods by the complete suppression of all exaggeration 

1 See his letters from 1850 to 1855, passim, and Brunetiere, Poesie 
lyrique, ii. 128. 

2 Cp. Brunetiere, op. cit. p. 171. 



MODERN FICTION. — THE NATURALISTIC SCHOOL. 437 

in scene or character. He avoided all complication of 
plot or intrigue. His stories owe their interest to re- 
productive, not to creative imagination. He seeks to 
present life in its manifold complexity, not to say in 
its petty puerility, as fully and as truly as possible ; 
therefore in modern life he takes types of the mediocre, 
the commonplace, the vulgar, with a self-tormenting 
devotion to his theory of art ; for he hated the char- 
acters that he drew, and his natural sympathies were 
so romantically effervescent that he was seldom able 
to restrain them in the society of his literary intimates. 
He has spoken of himself as of one with nerves laid 
bare, who shudders at the touch of the vulgarity he 
delights to pillory ; and after each accomplished task 
he sought an opportunity to " roar his fill " in some 
exotic scene. So " Salammbo " follows " Madame Bo- 
vary," and the " Temptation " succeeds " L'Education 
sentimentale " ; so, too, in his " Trois contes " he repaid 
himself for the restraint of " Coeur simple " by " Hdro- 
dias " and " Saint- Julien l'hospitalier," and if he had 
completed " Bouvard et Pecuchet," it was his intention 
to ease himself of that monument to human stupidity 
by a tale of Leonidas and Thermopylae. 

" Madame Bovary " is the story of a wife educated 
beyond her station, whose unfulfilled romantic aspira- 
tions drag her step by step to the depths of vulgar in- 
fidelity, so that at last suicide seems her only refuge 
from moral nausea. This warning against the dangers 
of romantic sentiment is enforced by photographic pic- 
tures of bourgeois life in its banality, true masterpieces 
of suppressed irony. Even the minor characters are 
drawn with remarkable vividness ; and one of them, the 
druggist Homais, has become a byword for provincial 
and philistine narrowness. 



438 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

Flaubert's first novel was at once type and model 
for the fiction of the next generation. It was the 
most easily comprehended and by far the most popular 
of his books, the first of the minute, passionless repro- 
ductions of the platitudes of modern life. But it was 
not a favorite with Flaubert, and in later years he 
was wont to speak of it as a youthful error, for he 
thought that the close conceded too much to the 
Eomantic spirit. So in " Sentimental Education " he 
carefully eliminated all such appeals to emotion. 
Here the tragic end is not suicide, but the slow wear- 
ing away of ideals under the corroding experiences of 
life, the abandonment of one ambition after another, 
and the result, Flaubert's social hell, the monotonous 
respectability of a provincial town. This study of politi- 
cal and social psychology is a microscopic dissection 
of human incapacity conducted with labor and patience 
that bear witness to the morose intensity of the 
author's incivism. But Flaubert might have remem- 
bered what he himself had said, that " disillusion 
belongs naturally to weak minds," and that " the dis- 
gusted are almost always impotent ; " so this book, 
though it does not lack powerful pages, lacks interest 
and kindly humor because it lacks sympathy. It has 
found admirers among the writers, but few among the 
readers, of fiction. 

In these stories Flaubert found vent for his anti- 
social spleen ; in " Salammbo " he gave wings to his 
sombre lyric imagination. He told Sainte-Beuve that 
in this tale of life at Carthage in the days of its 
splendor "he wished to fix a mirage by applying to 
antiquity the methods of the modern novel." So he 
studied the scenery on the spot, and exhausted the 
resources of the Imperial Library in his search for 



MODERN FICTION. — THE NATURALISTIC SCHOOL. 439 

documentary evidences, which he fused by a vast and 
sustained effort into a complete and consistent evoca- 
tion that makes this realistic epic the best historical 
novel of the half-century in France. But the under- 
lying thesis is unchanged. Ideals and aspirations are 
still wrecked, and drag down those who cherish them. 
Yet there is none of the complexity of modern life. 
Salammbo's mystic fatalism owes its charm to its ab- 
solute simplicity. The heroine is indeed, as Flaubert 
said, " a monomaniac, a kind of Saint Theresa, nailed 
to a fixed idea." It is perhaps from this very simpli- 
city that the characters impress the reader less than 
the descriptions. The story and its personages leave 
less mark on the mind than the charge of the elephants, 
the orgy of the mercenaries, or the long agony of their 
destruction. 

For twenty years the " Temptation of Saint Antony " 
was Flaubert's favorite task. Here he sought to spread 
before the reader, in a vision of the Egyptian hermit, 
the vast panorama of the joy of sense and intellect 
turning to dust and ashes. In mad procession, all 
deities, religions, heresies, philosophies, are exhibited, 
mocked, and cast into the limbo of scornful rejection. 
Then at last Satan shows the saint the horizon 
of modern science, from whose immensity he shrinks 
in terror. Antony seeks refuge from the crushing 
weight of knowledge in the animal, the vegetable 
world ; and as the night of his temptation ends, he is 
endeavoring to bury his being in primordial matter. 
Then in the rising sun appears the image of the Cruci- 
fied, and Antony betakes himself to prayer. "To 
take humanity in its cradle, to show it at every hour 
in blood and filth, to note with care each error, to 
deduce thence its impotence, misery, and emptiness, 



440 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

— such was Flaubert's cherished and slowly matured 
aim." But while this is surely his most learned and 
thoughtful work, it demands in the reader too much 
learning and thought, and, above all, too much of the 
author's own spirit, to enjoy a wide popularity. A time 
may come when this will seem Flaubert's masterpiece. 
To us it is by "Madame Bovary" that he marks an 
epoch in French fiction. 

Edmond and Jules de Goncourt x show the same 
delight in minute observation as Flaubert; while in 
them his elaboration of style becomes a tortured 
artificiality, a painful striving to translate the shades 
of thought and emotion into language. They began 
their literary career with appreciative studies of the 
art and manners of the eighteenth century, exhibiting 
an immense accumulation of details, but little power 
of historical evocation. Then in the last decade of 
the Empire they published six novels; and since 
Jules' death Edmond continued their joint work in 

1 Edmond, b. 1822, d. 1896; Jules, b. 1830, d. 1870, wrote together 
the novels: Charles Demailly, 1860; Soeur Philomene, 1861; Renee 
Mauperin, 1864; Germinie Lacerteux, 1865; Manette Salomon, 1867; 
Madame Gervaisais, 1869. Historical studies: Histoire de la societe 
francaise (Revolution et directoire), 1854-1855; La Kevolution dans 
les mceurs, 1854; Portraits intimes du xviii. siecle, 1856-1858; Marie 
Antoinette, 1 858 ; Les Maitresses de Louis XV. (Du Barry, Pompadour, 
Chateauroux, et ses soeurs) 1860, and 1878-1879 ; La Femme au xviii. 
siecle, 1862; L'Art au xviii. siecle, 1874; JJ Amour au xviii. siecle, 
1877. Since Jules' death Edmond has published the novels: La Fille 
£lisa, 1878; Les Freres Zemganno, 1879; La Faustin, 1882; Cherie, 
1884. Historical studies: Watteau, 1876; Prud'hon, 1877; Les Ac- 
trices au xviii. siecle, 1885-1890. Autobiography : Journal (7 vols.), 
1887-1894. 

Criticism : Delzant, Les Goncourt ; Spronck, Les Artistes litteraires, 
137; Doumic, Portraits d'ecrivains, 167; Lemaitre, Contemporains, 
iii. 37 ; Brunetiere, Eoman naturaliste, p. 273 ; Zola, Romanciers 
naturalistes, p. 223 ; Bourget, Nouveaux essais. 



MODERN FICTION. — THE NATURALISTIC SCHOOL. 441 

each field, though with somewhat slackened energy, and, 
by the publication of their Journal and his own, has 
thrown a welcome though sometimes indiscreet light 
on the group of writers who looked to him as their 
doyen. But it is their novels produced jointly that 
affected the development of fiction, and of these only 
is it necessary to speak here. 

They began with " Charles Demailly," — a satiric 
picture of petty journalism in the spirit of Balzac's 
" Illusions perdues," minutely realistic save, perhaps, ' 
for the wit with which they have generously endowed 
these gentry of a muzzled press. Then, in " Soeur Philo- 
mfene" they extended the borders of fiction to the 
hospital and clinic, with all their tortured, quivering 
life, — a dangerous step toward that topsy-turvy Idealism 
that makes the fancy delve where the Eomanticists 
had let it soar. In " Eende Mauperin " they returned 
to the bourgeoisie and to pseudo-respectability. This 
is a study of the " struggle for life " in a commercial 
and democratic society, — a subject to which Edmond 
recurred in "La Faustin" and "CMrie," declaring the 
former to be " a psychological and physiological study 
of the young girl growing up and educated in the 
hot-house atmosphere of the capital/' while the latter 
was to be " a monograph of the young girl observed 
in the environment of wealth, elegance, power, and the 
best society." 

" Eenee " is thought by many to be the best of the 
Goncourts' novels, and is certainly that from which 
Daudet learned an important part of his art. But the 
writers of their own school caught more inspiration 
from " Germinie Lacerteux," which, indeed, its authors 
regarded as " the model of all that has since been 
constructed under the name of Eealism or Naturalism." 



442 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

What they meant appears from the preface to the 
book itself. " We asked ourselves, are there still, for 
writer or reader in these years of our social equality, 
classes too unworthy, misfortunes too base, dramas 
too foul, catastrophes too ignoble in their terror," to 
be a fit subject for literary treatment ? " In a country 
without caste or legal aristocracy will the miseries of 
the humble and poor appeal to your interest, emotion, 
pity, as loudly as the miseries of the great and rich ? " 
This question they endeavored to solve for themselves 
by pursuing the shaft they had sunk in " Soeur Philo- 
mkne" still deeper into the sub-strata of society. 
Their " Germinie " is the true source and ante-type of 
"Nana" and " L'Assommoir " and all their numerous 
progeny. We have here what purports to be " a clinic 
of love" as demonstrated upon the body of a servant- 
girl, more sinned against than sinning, a festering lily, 
type of so many who in our social system " find on 
earth no more place for their bodies than for their 
hearts ; " and, as though to push to its utmost para- 
dox the divorce they proclaimed between fiction 
and respectability, Edmond afterward took for the 
subject of his "Fille Elisa" a prostitute from the 
street. 

After " Germinie " these zealots of Naturalism grew 
more extreme in their wish to present nature un- 
adorned and unarranged. They discarded all the con- 
ventions of structure, so that their books ceased to 
have or indeed to seek artistic unity. They became 
series of very slightly connected pictures, each exe- 
cuted with masterly exactness, and counting among 
them some of the greatest tours de force in impression- 
ist prose. But the general result of this relentless 
adherence to "observation" and the "little facts" is, 



MODERN FICTION. — THE NATURALISTIC SCHOOL. 443 

as Zola admits, to "sterilize their human documents/' 
and to deny the reader an element of interest that the 
somewhat remarkable hors d'ceuvres in metaphysics 
and archaeology 1 are far from supplying, for here the 
Goncourts hardly see clearly beyond their favorite 
eighteenth century. 

In all these novels, as in those of Flaubert, the 
observation is superficial, external, and dwelling with 
peculiar insistence on morbid manifestations. So far 
did this become a second nature that when Jules lay 
dying his brother noted each symptom of mental decay, 
and afterward published his observations, thinking 
" that it might be useful for the history of letters to 
give this grim study of the agony and death of a man 
who died of literature." There was in their method 
and spirit something of the painter's "life school." 
" Write what you see," was their guiding principle, by 
which they claimed that they could bring into a char- 
acter " the genuine life that they got from ten years' 
observation of a living being." Edmond declares 
" Ch^rie " the result of innumerable notes taken with 
an opera-glass, and " Germinie " a documentary embryo 
from their joint note-books. "Nowadays," says the 
preface to this novel, "fiction is beginning to be 
the serious, passionate, living form of literary study 
and social investigation ; by its psychological analysis 
and research it becomes the history of contemporary 
morals." In this it seemed to them to realize what 
Balzac had attempted and Taine desired ; but it must 
be borne in mind that, like Flaubert, they habitually 
neglected psychological for external realism, that they 

1 E. g., in u Madame Gervaisais," where, indeed, the slow corrosion 
by religious enthusiasm of a mind burdened with culture is traced 
with much skill, and invites comparison with Daudet's " L'fevangeliste." 



444 MODEEN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

merged individuality in fatalistic determinism, and so 
gave the first strong expression in fiction to the lessen- 
ing of will-power that marks the French literature 
of the past generation. Their pessimism, even more 
than Flaubert's, was less rational than emotional. It 
was an artistic convention, not a living conviction. 
Flaubert's realism was the product of study and books ; 
theirs had a touch of the reporter, of the chiffonnier of 
human documents, whose work is done not at his 
desk, but on the street and at the public gathering. 
One notices this especially in their conversations, 
which reflect admirably the skeptical Hague of the 
Parisian boulevardier. 

" What differentiates modern from ancient litera- 
ture," they tell us, " is that the particular tends to 
replace the general." From this point of view the 
Goncourts were the most modern of the moderns. 
But there are inevitable flaws in the method, for the 
more the novel is made to approximate to experi- 
mental science, the more it must sacrifice the interest 
that comes from imagination as well as from plot and 
intrigue. Their intensity of observation, " more sensi- 
tive than intelligent," left little play for fancy in 
the reader, and made its possessors feel, they said, as 
though their flesh were flayed and quivering. They 
were fascinated, like Taine, by extreme conditions and 
the morbid nervous states peculiar to the high pres- 
sure of modern society, and their own style shows 
how this nervous tension reacted on the writers 
themselves. It is in fiction what Symbolism is in 
poetry, and Impressionism in modern painting. Indeed, 
the Goncourts are above all else artists in words. 
They seek to fix a series of sensations by a series of 
images, and care more for what they call " the nota- 



MODERN FICTION. — THE NATURALISTIC SCHOOL. 445 

tion of indescribable sensations," for "pinning the adjec- 
tive," for a striking turn of expression, a vivid picture 
or epithet, than for grammatical structure or rhetorical 
correctness. But this is as much as to say that they 
subordinated clear statement to suggestion, substance 
to form, the exception to the rule ; and in so far they 
too were Eomanticists and false to the truer Naturalism 
to which they imagined themselves martyrs. For so 
strange a style disconcerted and repelled the great 
public ; and when these would not buy or praise, the 
Goncourts persuaded themselves and others that popu- 
lar applause and its rewards were marks of mediocrity. 
They chose to live for their art alone and for the 
choice spirits who could comprehend them. Thus 
they became " literary mandarins," and so contributed 
to set a fashion that has done vast harm to recent 
French literature, which for some years became es- 
tranged, to their mutual injury, from the great pub- 
lic, whose favorite authors, with Ohnet at their head, 
hardly belong to literature at all, 1 while the popular- 
ity of Zola, whom they claimed for their pupil, was due 
more to qualities that contradict their teaching than to 
those that accord even with his own. It was not till 
late in the seventies that the success of that enfant 
terrible attracted attention to his masters, and the 
public began to read as literary documents what they 
had neglected as novels. But others also had gone 
with Zola to this school with equal interest and more 
immediate and varied results than had been pro- 
duced by students of the epoch-marking rather than 
epoch-making "Madame Bovary." Zola and his fol- 
lowers will show us how this perverted Naturalism is 
but Eomanticism in disguise. 

1 Daudet is of course an exception. 



446 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

Emile Zola 1 was surely the greatest among the 
sombre students of the base in modern French life. 
Born of Venetian stock, and nursed under the warm 
sun of Provence, he had the hyperbolic imagination of 
his ancestry and youthful environment, both stimulated 
by a boyhood of privation that ended with a petty 
clerkship in the great publishing-house of Hachette, 
where Zola spent his scanty leisure in the hack-work 
of journalism, and distinguished himself by a zealous 
defense of the eccentric naturalistic painter, Edouard 
Manet. His juvenile work is interesting, for it shows 
that he who was to dominate French fiction for more 
than a decade, was not in his early novels abreast of 
the time. " The Mysteries of Marseilles " and the first 
"Contes a Ninon" suggest far more the " Wandering 
Jew " than they do " Madame Bovary." The first hint 
of later achievements is in " La Confession de Claude," 
which, however, pales before the terrible analysis of 
remorse in " Th^rfese Kaquin," whose best pages he has 
never surpassed for intensity and minute vision, while 
they announce also the morose and sombre pessimism 
of " L' Assomrnoir " and "Germinal." His next story, 

1 Born 1840, died 1902. Chronology of the more important fiction : 
Les Mysteres de Marseilles, Le Voeu d'une morte, Contes a Ninon, 
1864; Confession de Claude, 1865; Therese Raquin, 1867; Madeleine 
Ferat, 1868; Les Rougon-Macquart (20 vols.), 1871-1893; Les Trois 
villes, Lourdes, Rome, Paris, 1894-1898; Les Quatres evangiles ; 
Fecondite, 1899 ; Travail, 1901 ; Verite, 1902 ; Justice unfinished. 
Critical essays: Le Roman experimental, 1880; Les Romanciers nat- 
uralistes, 1881 ; Nos auteurs dramatiques, 1881; Documents litteraires, 
1881; Une Campagne, 1881; Correspondance : 3 vols., 1907-1908. 

Criticism: Brunetiere, Roman naturaliste, pp. 131, 297, 345; Dou- 
mic, Portraits d'ecrivains ; Laroumet, Nouvelles etudes de litterature 
et d'art ; Pellissier, Litterature contemporaine, pp. 56, 199, and Mouve- 
ment litteraire, p. 343 ; Lemaitre, Contemporains, i. 249, iv. 263 ; 
Sherard, £mile Zola, a biographical and critical study. 



MODERN FICTION. — THE NATURALISTIC SCHOOL. 447 

" Madeleine Ferat,"" is quite inferior to this ; but it 
marks the beginning of that interest in the mysterious 
problems of heredity by which he nursed and fortified 
the fatalistic determinism of the " Rougon-Macquart," 
— the most monumental achievement of French fiction 
since Balzac. 

This was followed by " The Three Cities," in which 
he traced the course of a young priest from Lourdes to 
Eome and Paris, from Catholicism to socialism and free 
thought. The last of this series was published in 1898, 
the year in which Zola threw himself into the lists in 
defense of Dreyfus and the republic against the schemes 
of a military cabal. Tried for calumniating a court- 
martial, he was convicted, appealed, and being again 
convicted, took refuge in England, whence time having 
justified him, he returned in honor in 1899, publishing 
in that year the first of four projected novels in which 
he, always a moralist, proposed to preach the four great 
social virtues: Fecundity, Work, Truth, and Justice, 
But three of these volumes had been finished when he 
died by accidental asphyxiation in 1902. His body was 
transferred to the Pantheon in 1908 and a public monu- 
ment erected to him in Paris in 1909. 

The strength of all Zola's fiction, at least from the 
time he found himself in " L'Assommoir," lies in his 
skill in handling crowds and massing effects. His 
genius is architectonic, imposing by accumulation 
rather than impressing by artistic arrangement or 
selection. 

Modern literary art, he thought, " should be wholly 
experimental and materialistic," that is, scientific and 
realistic. He said, as early as 1868, that his purpose 
in the " Rougon-Macquart," that " natural and social 
history of a family under the Second Empire," was 



448 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

" to study the problems of blood and environment, the 
secret workings that give to the children of one father 
different passions and temperaments, ... to paint a 
whole social era by a thousand details of men and 
manners, ... to study humanity itself in its most 
intimate workings, . . . and to show how ten or twenty 
beings who at first sight seem strangers appear by 
scientific analysis to be closely attached to one an- 
other." Heredity, he thought, " had its laws, like 
gravity." 

This theory of fiction, amalgamated from Taine and 
Flaubert, is proclaimed with more vigor in Zola's criti- 
cal essays than it is applied in his novels. Its weak 
points have been repeatedly and unsparingly laid bare; 
and this has tended to divert critical appreciation from 
the merits of his writing, which indeed lie quite else- 
where. It may be possible to import science into the 
novel, to make it reflect the last light of physio- 
psychology, as seen under the microscope of the deter- 
minist ; but Zola certainly has not done it, and the 
more we examine these " scientific experiments carried 
on in the free flight of imagination," which is his own 
description of " Le Keve," the more clearly we see that 
their power and fascination lie in what his theory 
would exclude, in the epic and Eomantic imagination 
of a morose and gloomy but grand and masterful painter 
of the animal instincts in human nature, which seem 
to possess and torment his spirit like a nightmare, 
dragging him through foulest slums of vice and dens 
of crime, forcing him to fix his eyes upon the bete 
humaine, till his fancy differentiates it into grandiose, 
hyperbolical types of blind, materialistic forces work- 
ing out the inevitable sum of human folly and misery. 

It is thus that we are to understand and perhaps in 



MODERN FICTION. — THE NATURALISTIC SCHOOL. 449 

some measure to excuse the sordidness, the nastiness, 
the blasphemy, and the obscenity of some melancholy 
pages in the " Kougon-Macquart," whose nearest paral- 
lels in earlier French literature had been the wholly 
condemnable " Contemporains du commun " of Eestif 
de la Bretonne. He is bent on showing what society, 
especially the society of the Second Empire, has made 
of its middle, lower, and lowest classes. That we may 
comprehend their moral decay, he will not veil even the 
crassest expression of it ; and while it may be justly 
urged from the aesthetic side that he has marred the 
effect by overloading the color, — that, as the French 
proverb says, " he has fallen on the side to which he 
inclined," — yet he may rightly claim that he has served 
an ethical purpose, not alone by making vice most 
repellent, but by flashing on our moral sense vivid reve- 
lations of the mental, emotional, and aesthetic gulf that 
separates the summit from the base of the social pyra- 
mid, the light-house of culture from the dark sea that 
laps its base and may some day drown its beams in the 
tempest of social revolution. 

But, one may fairly ask, has the social life depicted 
in " Nana," or in " L'Assomnioir," in " La Bete hu- 
maine," or in " La Terre," any corresponding reality ? 
Is it naturalistic ? Surely these stories do not typify 
normal average conditions. They have about the same 
relation to reality that an anatomical museum has to 
the sculptures of the Louvre. But both have their place. 
Fiction will perhaps be a greater social power by show- 
ing us, not where society stands, but whither it tends ; 
and that purpose is served by the stories of Nana, of 
Etienne, of Gervaise, and of Jean. It is here, and not 
in the success or failure of Zola's "scientific experi- 
ments," that we must seek for such ethical value as 

29 



450 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

the " Kougon-Macquart " possess, apart from artistic 
qualities of a nature much more rare. 

By the device of a legitimate and illegitimate branch, 
the descendants of the mentally unsound Adelaide 
Fouque are spread through all the strata of the Second 
Empire, where, in the race of the Eougons, the demo- 
cratic upheaval feeds the political ambition of one, the 
speculative mania of another, the scientific aspirations 
of a third, the restless commercial enterprise of a 
fourth ; and the predisposition to insanity manifests it- 
self now in a morbidly impressionable clerical celibate, 
now in an incarnation of mysticism that evaporates 
at the touch of earthly love, and now in a cataleptic 
victim of jealousy. Meantime the story of the chil- 
dren of Macquart has taken the reader into the crypts, 
and even sometimes into the vaults, of the social edifice. 
Drunkenness labors with insanity for the destruction 
of Gervaise, who bequeaths these tendencies, trans- 
formed now into a painter's sterile but ever travailing 
genius, now into the murderous mania of a locomotive 
engineer, now into the passionate revolt of a socialistic 
miner, or again into the poison-flower of vice avenging 
itself on the society that fostered it, — Nana, the gilded 
fly from the social dunghill, bearing on its wings the 
ferment of destruction, a contagion in the pest-stricken 
air of the Second Empire. Other Macquarts reveal the 
gross materialism of the multitude, whose god is their 
belly, or the sordid monotony of the lives of farmer 
and fisherman, relieved only by fits of gloomy bestiality, 
till finally chance so balances these elements of evil as 
to produce Jean, the prudent, hopeful, toiling peasant, 
to whom and to his like Zola commits the task of 
restoring France, poisoned by the Empire, crushed by 
foreign conquest and fratricidal war. 



MODERN FICTION. — THE NATURALISTIC SCHOOL. 451 

In his studies of speculation, ambition, and bour- 
geois life Zola sees everywhere pretence, hypocrisy, 
morality for external use only, glitter without, sordid- 
ness within. All his characters seem, as he makes one 
of them say of the- children in " Pot-bouille," "sick 
or ill-bred." Their principles are weak, their desires 
imperative, their will vacillating. They reflect the 
confidence of the time that science had established 
materialism ; and as a result of this they show a devel- 
opment of hedonistic fatalism and a weakening of those 
inhibitive functions by which alone the happiness of 
self-control is won. It may be worth noting here 
before we pass to the lower circles that Zola could have 
known nothing by observation of the carnival of lux- 
ury, the wild whirl of speculation, the Napoleonic eagle 
turned vulture, that he describes, for instance, in " La 
Curde." These chapters are, however, admirable in- 
stances of the power of trained realistic imagination, 
sharpened by the privations of his own youth and fed 
on the opera-glass notes of his friends and patrons, 
the Goncourts and Flaubert. 1 

The nine novels that deal with the laboring class offer 
a more congenial field to Zola's grand but gloomy 
talent ; and it is this truly " apocalyptic epic " that 
found the first and greatest recognition, both from 
critics and from the public, though it may well be 
that the qualities for which the former read, are not 
always those that the latter admire, 2 Even a super- 

1 There are eleven novels in the hourgeois group with an average 
circulation of 64,000. Of these the most popular is "Le Reve," the 
most crass, " Pot-bouille," the most artistic, " La Faute de l'abbe 
Mouret." 

2 Of these the average circulation has been 102,000. Criticism 
would doubtless give the first place to " Germinal," the second to 
" L 'Assommoir." The public has preferred " Nana " and " La De- 



452 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

ficial examination suffices to show that this " experi- 
mental scientist " in fiction works more by logic than 
by observation, more by deduction than analysis. As 
he says himself, he describes temperaments rather than 
characters, types rather than individuals, masses rather 
than men. And he looks at these masses, types, and 
temperaments as a determinist, if not as a fatalist, to 
whom things seem to have almost as much personality 
as the bete humaine itself. It is curious to watch this 
tendency as it develops in " L'Assommoir," " Germinal," 
and " La Debacle." Already, in the first of these, the 
dram-shop, society's device for the production of sin 
and crime, with its panting distillery on exhibition, 
breathes as true and individual a life as the wretched 
washerwoman who gropes her way in misery and sor- 
didness, and wrecks herself on brutality and vice. 
For the narrow horizon of such animal existence inevi- 
tably involves its own disappointment. The material- 
ism of these well-fed city artisans kills in their hearts 
all moral purpose, all the higher interests of life. Not 
only is there no religion; there is no loyalty, no 
decency, no self-restraint, and so there can be no suc- 
cessful resistance to petty vices, but rather a moral 
stagnation that finds its only sure consolation in feast- 
ing and drunkenness. From being of the earth, 
earthy, it grows of the dirt, dirty, till the pseudo- 
respectable friends of the besotted Gervaise are ready 
to pay her in drink for mimicking her husband's de- 
lirium tremens, and to laugh at the exhibition, till 
she dies in a forgotten closet, to be discovered only by 
her corpse's putrefaction ; while the snaky coils of the 

bade," and buys more copies of " La Terre " than of " Germinal," 
though that novel is certainly the worst artistically, and the least 
naturalistic, of the whole series. 






MODERN FICTION. — THE NATURALISTIC SCHOOL. 453 

distillery continue to ooze their alcoholic sweat like a 
slow, persistent spring. 

This is no photographic realism. It is Koraanticism 
a rebours. Even the environment is treated romanti- 
cally, 1 and the characters are not shown in their inner 
workings, as with Stendhal or Bourget, but in their 
external manifestations. They appear and reappear, 
changed we know not how or why, just as we might 
meet them from day to day in some city street. And 
we shall find all these elements accentuated, magnified, 
in " Germinal," — that grandiose epic of the strike and 
the mine. In place of the oozing still we have here 
the pumping-engine, dominating all with a soulless, 
relentless, panting life, vague yet real, and swallowed 
in the collapsing pit at last, like a monster struggling 
with destruction, while another force, mysterious, 
unseen, is the corporation, soulless, relentless, compel- 
ling these miners to their daily tasks, and itself as 
joyless as they. Among these colliers the individual 
is lost in the type even more than with the artisans of 
" L'Assommoir." They force themselves on the mind 
with a vivid, nightmare life, until their very filthiness 
and squalor becomes real and natural ; until we feel as 
though in some far-off existence we ourselves had 
shared it, had been goaded to revolt like the sober 
Maheu, or felt, with Maheude, the bitter irony of a 
domestic life that sends mother and child to the coal-pit 
to keep them from starvation ; until we feel that we 
might be even now as they are, were we condemned 
like them, from birth, to this cramped blackness and 
joyless monotony, on whose horizon there dawns no 

i Witness that astonishing tenement stairway (I/Assommoir, pp. 64- 
75) leading to the attic workshop, where Lorilleux has hammered his 
eight thousand metres of gold chain. 



454 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

ray of hope, for even they see that fierce, visionary 
socialism would but increase unsatisfied desires. The 
whole sad epic breathes " the uselessness of everything, 
the eternal dolor of existence." Only at the very close 
does Zola seem to seek a desperate consolation in the 
" germinal " forces of nature. 

Artistically the great power of " Germinal " lies in 
the handling of masses of men, the procession of strik- 
ing miners, or the mob howling for bread and stilled 
with bullets ; and similar passages make "-La Ddbacle " 
one of the greatest war stories of all literature. Here 
are superb pictures of armies concentrating with me- 
chanical precision around the fatal Sedan, of regiments 
on the march, or herded in cattle-cars or prison-pens, 
or surging to and fro through flaming Paris, or in the 
blood-stained streets of Bazeilles, or lying in furrows 
under fire on the plateau of Alg^rie, or dashing to 
destruction from the Calvary of Illy with the gallant 
chasseurs of Margueritte. Here, too, is Napoleon, 
whose luxurious camp train and guards reappearing at 
rhythmic intervals, take the place of the mining- 
engine and the still ; and every one of the later novels 
has a similar object that serves as the burden of his 
epic narrative, brooding over all, and inspiring it with 
a weird life, such as Hugo drew from Notre-Dame and 
from the sea. In " Docteur Pascal " it is the cupboard 
with its mass of family documents ; in " L' Argent " it 
is the Stock-Exchange ; in " La Terre " the fecund fields 
of La Beauce ; in " Au bonheur des dames " the great 
shop ; in " Une Page d'amour " the vision of Paris in 
sunshine and storm, at dawn, at noon, at eve and mid- 
night ; and in " La Faute de l'abb£ Mouret " it is the 
wild, luxuriant Paradou, heavy with swelling life. 

This method of composition is essentially epic and 



MODEKN FICTION. — THE NATURALISTIC SCHOOL. 455 

idealistic ; and if Zola's style be examined, it will be 
found that in spite of all that he has written of 
" human documents," in spite of his detailed descrip- 
tions, he is a less minute realist than Balzac or even 
than Daudet. On the other hand, he is more florid, 
more picturesque ; he revels in adjectives, and shows in 
similes and metaphors a strange, poetic vision and an 
essentially Eomantic fancy. A single example may 
illustrate this. The pumping-engine of " Germinal " is 
about to sink into the flooded and collapsing mine. 
" You saw the machine," says Zola, " dislocated on its 
base, its limbs extended, fighting with death. It 
moved still, stretched its connecting-rod, its giant 
knee, as though to rise, then it expired, crushed, en- 
gulfed. Only the chimney, thirty metres high, re- 
mained erect, shaken like a mast in a hurricane. It 
seemed as though it must crumble and fly into powder, 
when all at once it sank in a mass, was drunk up by 
the earth, melted away like some colossal taper ; and 
nothing appeared, not even the lightning-rod tip. It 
was ended. That wicked beast, crouched in that 
hollow, gorged with human flesh, heaved no more its 
long and heavy breath. Utterly the Voreitx had sunk 
to the abyss." This is not precisely an experimental 
" slice of crude life." It is something much better and 
higher. For Zola's poetic instinct constantly corrects 
the vice of his theory, which it seems he had himself 
ceased to hold in its extreme form. For when his 
rouged and painted emperor, on the eve of Sedan, was 
called in question, he answered by claiming " the lib- 
erty of a poet to take what version suited him ; " and 
we grant the liberty gladly, but he should have remem- 
bered that it was the liberty of Eomantic idealism. 
Zola says that he conceives the art of writing to be 



456 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

" to have a vivid impression, and to render it with the 
greatest possible intensity/' This vivid intensity he 
seeks to attain by exaggeration of the salient features 
in landscape, action, or character; and he does this 
often at the expense of good taste and moral conven- 
tions, and still oftener at the expense of the " human 
document." When dealing with scenes of low life, 
he is apt to deepen the impression by using himself 
the language of the class of whom he speaks. Thus 
" I/Assomnioir " comprises in its descriptive passages a 
fairly complete repertory of artisan slang, and in the 
conversations he shrinks from no vulgarity that may 
minister to a phonographic realism, which is not neces- 
sarily a true one, since the same words convey quite 
different impressions to different social classes. This 
is, however, by no means its only fault, for if we go 
behind the outward form to the inner content of the 
speeches, it often seems as though a dread of embellish- 
ment had led him to its opposite. " Strange world,'' 
says Lemaitre of " Pot-bouille," " where the porters 
speak like poets and the others like porters." x It is 
indeed a strange world, for it is the world of that living 
antinomy, a morose Eomanticist. 

The language in which he describes this world en 
gris is copious, flowing, often in the later novels re- 
dundant, growing more and more architectural, depend- 
ing for effect more on masses than on details, with 
neither the polish of Flaubert, nor the mannered affec- 
tation of the Goncourts, inaccurate in the use of words, 
and falling sometimes into undeniable solecisms. He 
writes, as Pellissier says, " not only without tact, but 
without precision. And yet, in spite of all, this gross, 

1 Op. cit. i. 261. Cp. on Zola's conversations Brunetiere, op. cit. 
p. 305. 



MODEKN FICTION. — THE NATURALISTIC SCHOOL. 457 

heavy, ponderous style makes in the end an impression 
of monotonous power and brutal grandeur in intimate 
harmony with that reign of inexplicable blind fatality, 
that overhangs " this grandiose evocation of topsy-turvy 
idealism. 

The most complete illustration of Zola's theory 
of fiction is not found in his own works, but in those 
of the five young writers who co-operated with him in 
u Les Soirees de MMan." Three of these indeed call 
for no notice here. 1 But of Huysmans 2 it is well to 
speak briefly, and Maupassant's genius makes a worthy 
close to this epoch in the evolution of fiction. The 
former of these had a powerful but extremely erratic 
talent, that he first devoted to rather nauseating stud- 
ies of collage, treating subjects from Parisian Bohemia 
in the style of " L'Assommoir," but afterward uniting 
this crass Naturalism with something of the morose 
satanism of Baudelaire, and finding his art the more 
lovable the more its subject invited repulsion and con- 
tempt. But he seemed to take such a malicious pleas- 
ure in eliminating all grace of form or correctness of 
language from his pictures of ugliness, that morbid 
curiosity soon turned to nausea at the wearisome 
chaplet of vile images in which one sought in vain for 
any purpose, aesthetic or moral. Nature is full of de- 
cay ; but books that seem to borrow their unhealthy glow 

1 Ceard and Hennique have since become more eclectic in their 
methods. Alexis has sunk his talent in uncleanness. 

2 Huysmans (b. 1846) is a Fleming. In the " Soire'es de Medan," 
his " Sac au dos " surpasses all that collection in crass realism. The 
novels alluded to below are, " Les Soeurs Vatard," " Marine," and 
" En menage." Baudelairism appears in " A rebours " and "La-bas ; " 
the reaction in " En route," " La Cathedrale," 1 898, and "L'Oblat," 1903. 

Criticism of Huysmans in Lemaitre, Contemporains, i. 311 ; Brune- 
tiere, Romanciers naturalistes, pp. 321 sqq. ; Huneker, Egoists, pp. 
167-206. 



458 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

from the phosphorescence of a decomposing brain are 
neither artistic nor natural. Even Huysmans wearied 
of himself, and in his later novels joined those pessi- 
mists who " have grown tired of the Devil and are try- 
ing a reconciliation with God." " En Boute" is a study 
of monastic dilettantism, which leads his hero to the 
weary conclusion that he is " too much a man of 
letters to be a monk, and has already too much of the 
monk to live with men of letters." " La Cath^drale " and 
"L'Oblat " present, however, with great skill the beauty 
of ecclesiastical symbolism in architecture and in ritual. 
Guy de Maupassant, 1 a nephew of Flaubert, passed 
his youth at Eouen, where he became a close student 
both of Normandy and of the literary methods of his 
uncle, from whom he learned the concise and pregnant 
style that differentiated him at his first essay from the 
Goncourts and from Zola, and made him in so far a 
truer Naturalist than either, as he was also a pro- 
founder and somewhat more sympathetic psychologist. 
His " Boule de suif " led all its fellows of the " Soirees 
de M^dan " in originality and compact diction, and it 
struck the keynote of all his later fiction. The scene is 
Normandy, a region whose inhabitants have and perhaps 

1 Born 1850'; died 1893. Poetry: Des vers, 1880. Fiction: Boule 
de suif (in Les Soirees de Medan, 1880); Une Vie, 1883; Bel-ami, 
1885; Mont-Oriol, 1887; Pierre et Jean, 1888; Forte comme la mort, 
1889; Notre cceur, 1890; and the posthumously published L'arae 
etrangere and L'Angelus. Sixteen volumes of short stories, of which 
the chief are: La Maison Tellier, 1881 : Mile. Fifi, 1882 ; M. Parent, 
1886; La Horla, 1887. Drama: Musotte, 1891. Notes of travel: 
Clair de lune, 1883 ; Au soleil ; 1884 ; Sur Feau, 1888. 

Critical essays : Doumic, Ecrivains d'aujourd'hui, Brunetiere, Eo- 
manciers naturalistes, p. 397 (with which it is curious to compare the 
views expressed in the same book, pp. 327, 334, 342) ; Lemaitre, Con- 
temporains, i. 285, v. 1 . The origins of several of Maupassant's most 
noted tales are discussed in " Revue bleue " (July, 1893) and " Journal 
des debats" (August 10, 1893). 



MODERN FICTION. — THE NATURALISTIC SCHOOL. 459 

deserve a repute of hard, thrifty selfishness, from which 
Maupassant has distilled a type of egoistic, cynical 
pessimism that runs through his early work, deepening 
gradually into nihilism and sinking at last to insanity. 
Thus Maupassant offers a melancholy but fascinat- 
ing study in literary psychology. We first hear of him 
as "in extremely good health, ruddy, and with the 
look of a robust country bourgeois." The friends of 
those years speak of him sometimes as a playful satyr, 
sometimes as a lusty human bull. Yet one can see 
that even then there was a worm at the root of the 
tree, which his aristocratic assumption of superiority 
to his literary fellows cloaked but did not hide. He 
said himself that "literature had never been to him 
anything but a means of emancipation," that he " never 
found any joy in working;" indeed, it might seem that 
his writing contributed to hasten his disease, and' we 
can see in it how his heart loses year by year the sen- 
suous exuberance of his youth. This lover of the 
senses and all that they brought him dwelt as persis- 
tently as G-autier and Baudelaire on the very mystery 
of death that he denied, until toward the last 1 it seemed 
as though he were at times hypnotized by its ghastly 
fascination. Body and mind suffered under the night- 
mare. He travelled in search of health, still more in 
search of distraction. But his gloom followed him 
even to the sun-lit Mediterranean. His notes of travel 
are sicklied o'er with the pale cast of a pessimism 
radically different from the sterile contempt of Flaubert, 
or Zola's morose determination to erect a Babel monu- 
ment to human vice and misery. Maupassant's pessi- 
mistic pain is mortal earnest. He will live as he 

1 E. g., in La Horla. Cp. Claretie, in North American Review, 
August, 1892. 



460 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

believes, as though life were a succession of fatalities 
caused by imperative desires, and ending for good with 
death. 1 Now, this philosophy of life offers no check to 
sensuality save satiety, but to a man of strong mind 
that check is swift and bitterly efficient. Those orgies 
that far into the night once roused his neighbors in 
their country villas at Etretat gave way to morbid 
speculation on the essential misery of man, and to 
scientific investigations with which he deliberately 
nursed the pessimism that was corroding his brain. 
So the robust animalism of " Une Vie " and of " Bel- 
ami " changed to the melancholy moral anatomy of 
" Fort comme la mort " and " Notre coeur." Already 
in 1887 the weird fancies of " La Horla " were a symp- 
tom of the end. " That way madness lies." Maupas- 
sant had reasoned himself into a moral pitfall from 
which he saw no issue. But he had approached it in 
his earlier tales with such calm, such clear vision, that 
were it not for his life's tragedy, one might be tempted 
to regard his work as the ironic, satiric, and cynical 
reduction to the absurd of literary pessimism. 

To analyze the novels of Maupassant is unnecessary 
to our purpose, but it is worth while to note how they 
mark the stages of his mental devolution. The first two 
are narratives of lives ; " Mont-Oriol " marks a transi- 
tion ; and the novels that follow are dramas of situation, 
of morbid emotion, all of them dominated by a horror 
of old age that growls each year more penetrating and 
all-pervading. Artistically, the best work is probably 
in " Pierre et Jean," a study of fraternal jealousy. As 
pictures of the morals of pessimism, " Une Vie " and 
" Bel-ami," though the author disclaims any moral pur- 

1 This is essentially the creed of " Sur l'eau," written when the 
author was thirty-eight. 



MODERN FICTION. — THE NATURALISTIC SCHOOL. 461 

pose, will not fail of a moral result that has in it the 
possibility of good ; but " Fort comme la mort," a tale 
of incestuous love, is hardly profitable, and "Notre 
coeur " is not profitable at all. 

It is difficult to convey an idea of Maupassant's style, 
though it is easy to cite characteristic passages, nor 
need they be long ones. His descriptions are always 
packed into the smallest space. He studies compression 
as Balzac and Zola do completeness. He is as easy as 
Flaubert is labored, as graceful as the Goncourts are 
artificial. But his apparent limpidity often masks a 
meaning that is not at once perceived. Here is an 
approach to Paris at evening: — 

" The carriage passed the fortifications. Duroy saw 
before him a ruddy brightness in the sky, like the glow of 
a gigantic forge. He heard a confused, vast, unbroken 
murmur, made up of innumerable and different noises, a 
dull panting, now near, now distant, a vast, vague palpita- 
tion of life, the breath of Paris gasping in the spring night 
like a colossus worn out with fatigue." (Bel-ami, p. 273.) 

In this there is something of Zola's force with the 
added strength of condensation. But Maupassant has 
also at his command a lightness of touch reached by 
none of the Naturalists and hardly attained even by 
Daudet. Listen, for instance, to this organ study : 

" Sometimes the pipes cast out prolonged vast clamors, 
swelling like waves, so sonorous and so mighty that it 
seemed as though they would lift and burst the roof to 
spread themselves in the blue sky. Their vibrations filled 
all the church, and made flesh and blood tremble. Then 
all at once they grew calm. Delicious notes fluttered alert 
in the air, and touched the ear like light breaths. There 
were little melodies, graceful, pretty, tripping, that flitted 



462 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

like birds. And suddenly the coquettish music swelled 
anew, became terrible in its strength and amplitude, as 
though a grain of sand had become a world." (Bel-ami, 
p. 439.) 

Often a single phrase or word of Maupassant will print 
itself on the mind with startling vividness. Of all the 
sombre disciples of Taine he is beyond question the 
greatest master of language, the most finished stylist. 

In the short story Maupassant's compact style has 
made him an unchallenged master. The artistic self- 
restraint of " Une Fille de ferine," " Monsieur Parent," 
" Hautot pere et fils," or " Le Bapteme," is as art wholly 
admirable. There was in that generation a noteworthy 
revival of this genre so much cultivated in the eight- 
eenth century. Here we shall see Daudet win his 
first success ; here Copp^e, HaleVy, Lavedan, and many 
others did work of much merit ; but above them all 
ranks Maupassant. He published more than a hun- 
dred such tales. There are stories of Normandy, chiefly 
tragic, though touching at times a delightfully comic 
vein. 1 There are tales, perhaps too many, of Parisian 
foibles, of life in strange lands, of hunting, of medi- 
cine, and of love, crime, horror, misery, over all of 
which there plays a delicate psychological analysis, 
keen and often kindly. To all he brings the same 
careful elaboration, the conscientious effort of a man 
seeking in work emancipation from self. It cannot be 
denied, however, that his aesthetic feeling is keener 
than his ethical instinct. Tales like " Imprudence " 2 
show the writer at his best, the author at his worst. 
Still it is by his stories rather than by his novels that 

1 E. g., Tribunaux rustiques, in "M. Parent," p. 189. 

2 M. Parent, p. 159. 



MODERN FICTION. — THE NATURALISTIC SCHOOL. 463 

Maupassant will hold his place in French fiction, though 
in his cynicism, as in his art and in his life, he too is 
a champion of Naturalism pushed to that unnatural 
excess where it merges into perverted Idealism. 

Several writers of this period who stood apart from 
the Naturalistic School earned a popularity or a critical 
recognition sufficiently enduring to justify brief men- 
tion. Henri Murger's "Scenes de la vie de Boheme" 
(1851) is a classic of decadent romanticism. Fromen- 
tin, the artist, gave in "Dominique" (1863) a master- 
piece of artistic psychic realism. The " national novels " 
of Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian, notably 
"Madame Th&fese " (1863) and " Le Conscrit de 1813" 
(1864), are excellent in their bourgeois kind. Gustave 
Droz presented with gay irony the sentiment and frivol- 
ity of the Second Empire, as the novels of Haldvy, not- 
ably "L'Abb6 Constantin" (1882) and " M. et Mme. 
Cardinal" (1873) did that of the first decades of the 
Third Eepublic. The resolute optimism and humani- 
tarian sympathy of Hector Malot won international 
recognition for his "Sans Famille " (1878). Interna- 
tional, too, is the repute of Gaboriau for the ingenuity 
of his stories of crime and its detection. Jules Verne's 
fairy tales of science are as familiar to American as to 
French readers. Henri Gr^ville (Mme. Durand) gained 
great though passing vogue for the sentimental sensa- 
tionalism of her Eussian tales. Francois Coppde, esti- 
mable also as a poet and naturalist of sentiment, painted 
the life of the Parisian petite bourgeoisie with the delicate 
feeling of " an aristocrat who loves the masses." Finally 
Catulle Mendfes suffered greater literary and poetic gifts 
than any of these possessed and a genius akin to Gautier's 
to be frittered away for lack of ethical or moral stability. 



464 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 



CHAPTEE XIII. 

MODERN FICTION. — III. THE WANING OF NATURALISM. 

While the theorists of the " experimental novel " were 
combating the idealism of the beautiful with the 
idealism of the base, in works of unquestionable though 
sometimes misdirected genius, several writers who had 
been born in the early years of Eomanticism were devel- 
oping a saner though feebler realism ; and close upon 
them followed Daudet, born in the same year as Zola, 
who was the first to show to the extreme Naturalists 
the more excellent way of realistic sympathetic Impres- 
sionism, thus opening the path for the devolution of 
Naturalism and for the varied developments of the last 
thirty years that we associate with the names of Loti, 
Bourget, Barrfes, Provost, and Margueritte. Daudet's 
novels, and especially those of the seventies, from "Fro- 
mont " to " Numa Koumestan," are cardinal points in 
the evolution of the new fiction; but before his posi- 
tion can be. well defined it is necessary to consider 
briefly the secondary elements in the literary environ- 
ment of his younger years. 

The oldest among the men who might have influenced 
his development was Feuillet, whose general character- 
istics have already claimed attention. 1 As a novelist he 
first won distinction by the idealistic and somewhat 
sentimental " Eoman d'un jeune homme pauvre," just 
1 See chap. x. p. 392. 



MODERN FICTION. — THE WANING OF NATURALISM. 465 

a year after Flaubert's " Madame Bovary " had inaugu- 
rated the movement from which his own later works 
drew much of their power. Feuillet was the favorite 
novelist of the brilliant but hollow society of the Sec- 
ond Empire. He poses as the advocate of conventional 
morality and of the aristocracy of birth and feeling. 
But under this thin disguise he involves his gentlemen 
and ladies in highly romantic complications whose 
fundamental immorality is often far from doubtful. 
Yet as the accredited painter of the Faubourg St. Ger- 
main he contributed in his way and in a narrow sphere 
an essential element to the development of realistic fic- 
tion. No one has rendered so well as he the high- 
strung, neuropathic women of the upper class, who 
neither understand themselves nor are wholly compre- 
hensible to others. But his earlier manner, that of the 
" Family Musset," yielded in " M. de Camors " to the 
demands of a stricter realism. Especially after the fall 
of the Empire had removed a powerful motive for' 
glozing the vices of aristocratic society, he came to 
paint its hard and selfish cynicism as none of his 
contemporaries could have done, 1 though he still made 
himself the preacher of that fashionable Catholicity 
which is a sort of shibboleth of the aristocratic Adul- 
lamites under the Third Eepublic. 2 

A lesser and somewhat younger romancer, of more 
tact than talent, was Cherbuliez, 3 who treats his stories 

1 Compare, for instance, "M. de Camors," 1867, with " Julia de 
Trecoeur," 1872, " Histoire d'une parisienne," 1881, and "Amours de 
Philippe/' 1887. 

2 Especially in "La Morte," 1886. 

3 Born 1829, died 1899. Chronology of chief novels: Le Comte 
Kostia, 1863; Ladislas Blowski, 1869; M eta Holdennis, 1873 ; Samuel 
Brohl et Cie, 1877; La Bete, 1887; Apres fortune faite, 1896; Jac- 
quine Vanesse, 1898. He wrote also several volumes of critical studies. 

30 



466 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

in Voltaire's manner as vehicles for philosophic dia- 
logues to discuss questions of science or sociology 
with his finger on the public pulse. These discussions 
are often excellent, but the novels that contain them are 
almost always shallow in analysis, and as commonplace 
in sentiment as they are strained and involved in Roman- 
tic intrigue. Of more sterling merit but less popularity 
was Ferdinand Fabre, 1 who, like Eenan, was once a 
seminarist, and from this vantage-ground studied cler- 
ical life with such sincere and careful observation as 
to earn for himseJf the somewhat too flattering title, 
" the Balzac of the clergy ; " while his delicate delinea- 
tions of peasant character have hardly been equalled 
since George Sand. But, though his humor is more 
playful and his heart more sympathetic, his talent is 
not of the measure of the great realist who penned 
the pitiless " Cur6 de Tours." Here, too, is a fit place 
to speak of Andre Theuriet, 2 who, though surely not a 
great writer, perhaps best met the wishes of that large 
class who seek in literature agreeable rest and distrac- 
tion rather than excitement or aesthetic gratification. 
He was one of the gentlest spirits that survived the 
bankruptcy of Romanticism, excelling in descriptions of 
country nooks and corners, of polite rusticity that knows 
nothing of the delving laborers of " La Terre," but only of 
graceful leisure, of solitude nursed in revery, and passion 
that seems the healthy springtide of germinating nature. 

1 Born 1830, died 1898. Chronology of chief novels : L'Abbe Ti- 
graine, 1873; Barnabe, 1875 ; Mon oncle Benjamin, 1881 ; Taillevent, 
1897. Autobiography: Ma vocation, 1889; Ma jeunesse, Mon cas 
litteraire, 1903. 

2 Born 1833, died 1907. Poetry: Le Chemin du bois, 1867. Fiction: 
Le Mariagede Gerard, 1875; Deux barbeaux, 1879 ; Madame Heurte- 
loup, 1882; Tante Aurelie, 1884; Peche mortel, 1885; Amour d'au- 
tomne, 1888 ; L'Amoureuse de la prefete, 1889 ; Mon oncle Flo, 1906. 
Autobiography : Annees de printemps, 1896 ; Jours d'ete, 1901. 



MODERN FICTION. — THE WANING OF NATURALISM. 467 

Such were the more or less idealistic contemporaries 
of the Naturalistic leaders and the men who with 
them might have influenced the early steps in fiction 
of Alphonse Daudet, who shares with Zola the first 
place in modern French fiction, though, as will 
appear presently, they have more points of contrast 
than of resemblance except in their fundamental 
method. His literary character is more complex than 
Zola's, and his life has a more direct bearing on his 
work. 

Alphonse Daudet J was born at Nimes in the year 
of Zola's birth at Aix, so that both are natives of 
Provence, and joint-heirs of its warm imagination. 
Of his boyhood and early youth Daudet has given 
us an exquisite sketch in " Le Petit Chose." His 
father had been a well-to-do silk-manufacturer; but 
while Alphonse was still a child, he lost his property, 
and went with his family to Lyons, where the boy 
read and wrote much, but studied little. Poverty pres- 
ently constrained him, however, to seek the wretched 
post of usher (pion) in a school at Alais, where, from 
his own account, his life must have been much like 
that of Nicholas Nickleby at Dotheboys Hall. After 
a year of this slavery, he left Alais in desperation, and 
joined his almost equally penniless brother Ernest in 

1 Born 1840, died 1897. Important helps to the study of his life 
and work are, first, his own " Le Petit Chose," 1868 ; " Souvenirs d'un 
homme de lettres," 1888 ; and " Trente ans de Paris," 1880 ; then 
Ernest Daudet, Mon frere et moi, souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse ; 
Sherard, Alphonse Daudet, a Biographical and Critical Study, Doumic, 
Portraits d'ecrivains, p. 257; Brunetiere, Roman naturaliste, pp. 81 
and 369 ; Lemaitre, Contemporains, ii. 273, iv. 217 ; Zola, Komanciers 
naturalistes, p. 255 (quite faithfully echoed in Pellissier, Mouvement 
litteraire, p. 350); Lanson, op. cit. pp. 1056-1057. This study of 
Daudet has appeared with some omissions as the introduction to the 
author's edition of " Le Nabab," Boston : Ginn & Co. 



468 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

Paris, in November, 1857. Thus far the autobiography 
of " Le Petit Chose." The rest of that story, published 
in 1868, is a not very vigorous poetic fancy ; and in- 
deed all of his work prior to the Franco-German war 
(1870-1871) shows idyllic grace, but lacks force. 

His first years of literary life were those of an in- 
dustrious Bohemian, with poetry for consolation and 
newspaper work for bread. Zola, who first met him 
in these years, describes him as u living on the out- 
skirts of the city with other poets, a whole band of 
joyous Bohemians. He had the delicate, nervous 
beauty of an Arab horse, with flowing hair, silky, 
divided beard, large eyes, narrow nose, an amorous 
mouth, and over it all a sort of illumination, a breath 
of tender light that individualized the whole face, with 
a smile full at once of intellect and of the joy of life. 
There was something in him of the French street-boy 
and something of the Oriental woman." Above all, 
he was a most winning man, gaining easily patrons, 
friends, critics, the world, and always gracefully as- 
suming an independence that others might have hesi- 
tated to claim. 

He had secured a secretaryship with the Due de 
Morny, President of the Corps L^gislatif, and presiding 
genius of the Empire, and had won recognition for his 
short stories in "Le Figaro," when in 1859 failing 
health compelled him to go to Algeria, which he fre- 
quently visited, as well as Corsica, in later and more 
prosperous years. Besides the obvious traces of these 
visits in " Le Nabab," and in many short stories, they 
gave him, in general, a power of exotic description not 
common in France, and strengthened his Provencal 
imagination, while revealing to him its dangers. But 
whatever he might owe to the fortunate necessity of 



MODERN FICTION. — THE WANING OF NATURALISM. 469 

this journey, he owed much more to his marriage soon 
after his return to a lady whose literary talent com- 
prehended, supplemented, and aided his own. He had 
lingered in literary Bohemia long enough to know its 
charm; he left it before he had suffered from its 
dangers. 

Though for five years in the civil service, he was 
always rather an observer than a politician, and never 
lost sight of his profession, to which he dedicated him- 
self entirely after Morny's death (1865). He now 
turned for a time from fiction to the drama, for he had 
definitely abandoned poetry, and it was not till after 
the war of 1870 that he became fully conscious of his 
vocation as a novelist, perhaps through the trials of 
the siege of Paris and the humiliation of his country, 
which deepened his nature without souring it. 1 

The years that immediately followed the war were 
still occupied with short stories and the genial satire 
of " Tartarin de Tarascon," but in 1874 "Fromont 
jeune et Eisler aine " showed that he was justified in 
a higher ambition ; for while he has since published 
several collections of short stories, it is the great series 
of his Parisian dramas, profound studies of life from 
life, on which his enduring fame will rest, though the 
choice, distilled irony of " Tartarin sur les Alpes " 
(1886) and " Port-Tarascon " (1890) would keep him 
in lasting remembrance. 2 

1 Daudet's dramas are La Derniere idole, 1862 ; Les Absents, 1864 ; 
L'CEillet blanc, 1865 ; Le Frere aine, 1867 ; Le Sacrifice, 1869 ; I/Arle- 
sienne, 1872 (thought by Zola to be his best) ; Lise Tavernier, 1872; 
Le Char, 1878; L'Obstacle, 1890. He assisted also in dramatizing 
most of his novels, but achieved no great theatrical success. 

2 Besides novels, Daudet published, after 1874, " Contes choisis," 
1879, " Les Cigognes," 1883, "La Belle-Nivernaise," 1886, and the two 
volumes of literary and autobiographical fragments already cited on 
p. 467. 



470 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

The story of Daudet's life is the story of his books, 
and to trace the development of his genius it is neces- 
sary to consider his fiction in its chronological order ; 
for while a well-defined individuality runs through it 
all, some qualities will be found to recede, while others 
grow in prominence, with his maturing genius. The 
"charm" which almost every critic has attributed to 
his work is most strongly marked in his first book, the 
poetry of " Les Amoureuses," with its accompanying 
" Fantaisies " (1857-1861). Both show in its greatest 
potentiality the idyllic spirit that can be traced in 
nearly all his later work. These verses to Clairette 
and Cdlimkne, to robins and bluebirds, and especially 
the triolets of " Les Prunes," and the fairy fancies in 
prose, " Ames du paradis," " Papillon et bete a bon 
Dieu," and " Chaperon rouge," are just the songs and 
the tales that Le Petit Chose would naturally write or 
dream in his Eobinson's Island at Nimes, in his truant 
wanderings at Lyons, or for his Petits, the primary 
class at Alais, and even in those first Paris days before 
the world came to be "too much with him." All this 
work is valuable to the critic because it explains how 
later books of a far higher order than this came to 
have a romantic, lyric, pathetic, and optimistic ele- 
ment, which by its contrast with the realistic, tragic, 
satiric, and pessimistic foundation of his novels gives 
them, not greater strength, but greater fascination and 
charm. 

The effect of Paris on the impressionable youth was 
to set him in search of new modes of literary expres- 
sion. He essayed, as we have seen, the drama, and in 
the " Lettres de mon moulin " made a considerable 
advance toward the position he was to occupy later. 
These stories, published in 1869, had been begun three 



MODERN FICTION. — THE WANING OF NATURALISM. 471 

years before in " L'Evdnement," a Parisian journal. 
The prevailing tone was still romantic and fanciful, 1 
but there are several stories that in their pathetic 
humor and delicate observation strike a more realistic 
key, and show the follower of Balzac, the student of the 
" Com^die huraaine." 2 In grotesque exaggeration 
"La Diligence de Beaucaire " anticipated "Tartarin," 
Corsican and Algerian life were realistically studied 
in several stories, "En Camargue" showed unsus- 
pected powers of sympathetic description of nature, 
and in " Nostalgies de la caserne " we have the first 
hint of that psychological analysis that becomes 
the dominant note in his most recent work. Prog- 
ress, nowhere startling, was marked in many direc- 
tions. The " Letters " were full of promises soon to 
be fulfilled. 

For eight years after the publication of the first 
" Lettres de mon moulin," Daudet was known as the 
greatest master of the short story in France. His 
work showed growing power as it struck deeper roots 
in the observation of life. In his four volumes of 
stories from these years 3 there are a few pieces still 
that recall the earlier manner, 4 but one is most struck 
by the glowing patriotism, tile growth of the urban 
element, and the development of pathetic social satire, 
stronger, fuller, yet identical in spirit with that of 

1 E. g., La Chevre de M. Seguin, La Mule du pape, L^lixir du 
Pere Gaucher, Le Cure de Cucugnan, Les Etoiles, Ballades en prose. 

2 Le Portefeuille de Bixiou, Les Deux auberges, L'Arlesienne. 

^ 3 Contes du lundi, 1873; Contes et recits, 1873; Robert Helmont, 
Etudes et pa)'sages, 1874; Femmes d'artistes, 1874. The " Lettres a 
un absent/' 1871, is no longer in print. A book for children, "Les 
Petits "Robinsons des caves," belongs also to this period. 

4 Un Keveillon dans le marais, La Soupe au fromage, Les Fees de 
France. 



472 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

" Les Deux auberges " of the antebellum period, 1 and, 
at times sinking to a more tragic key, as in " Arthur," 
the story of a drinking workman, whom it is instruc- 
tive to compare with the Coupeau of " L'Assommoir," 
or in "La Bataille du Pfere-Lachaise," a Communistic 
orgy in the tombs on the eve of defeat and execution. 

These delicate cameos in words, which, as a French 
critic says, are " extremely simple, but never banal, and 
often singular and rare," show everywhere the influence 
of the Franco-German war. This bitter experience 
taught him the deep pathos of " Le Sifege de Berlin " 
and " La Dernifere classe," the noble and true poetry 
of " Le Porte-drapeau " and " Les Mferes ; " it inspired 
the playful fancy of " Les Pat^s de M. Bonnicar," the 
exuberant satire of "La Defense de Tarascon," and 
the bitter realism of "Le Bac." Here are already 
studies for his Jack, for the Nabab, and for Mora. His 
humor has grown keener, his satire sharper, his knowl- 
edge of the darker side of life is vastly more minute, 
and yet his wide sympathy has suffered no loss. He 
has proved his armor at every part, and his first ven- 
ture in the higher field of the realistic novel, " Fromont 
jeune et Risier ain£ " (1874), shows already the hand 
of the master. 

Hence the short stories printed since 1874 may be 
briefly dismissed. They exhibit sustained but not 
advancing power. 2 For that we must look to the pro- 
found social studies of his " Parisian Dramas," and to 

1 E. g., Pere Achille, Un Teneur de livres, Le Turco de la com- 
mune, Un Decore du 15 aout, La Boheme en famille, Le Menage 
de chanteurs. Psychological analysis is represented by " Maison a 
vendre " and " Le Bac." 

2 " Contes choisis " (1879) are reprinted from earlier publications, 
"La Belle Nivernaise" (1886) is an exquisite idyl of boy life. "Les 
Cigognes" (1883) is juvenile. 



MODERN FICTION. — THE WANING OF NATURALISM. 473 

the humorous Tarasconades of his Tartarin. 1 These 
last demand and deserve a fuller notice. 

Tarascon is a city on the Ehone near Avignon and 
not far from Nimes, the birthplace of Daudet. In his 
hands it becomes a type of that South of France which 
plays so large a part in every department of his work. 
None has caught as he, with such delicately keen per- 
ception and such sympathy, that exuberant character 
that beneath the sun of Provence sees all in a mirage 
and lives in an unreal world, a self-created environ- 
ment, and yet charms in spite of its persistent self- 
deception. He has himself described it in his "Numa" 
as " pompous, classical, theatrical ; loving parade, cos- 
tume, the platform, banners, flags, trumpets ; clannish, 
traditional, caressing, feline, with an eloquence bril- 
liant, excited, and yet colorless ; quick to anger, but 
with a little pretence in its expression, even when the 
anger is sincere." Such is the Midi, such are the 
Nabab and Numa, and many others in their different 
kinds, and such is Tartarin, the immortal type of 
them all. 

He is first introduced to us as the hero of hunting- 

1 The novels in chronological, order are : Fromont jeune et Risler 
aine, 1874; Jack, 1876; Le Nabab, 1878; Kois en exil, 1879; Numa 
Roumestan, 1880; I/Evangeliste, 1883; Sapho, 1884; LTmmortel, 
1888; Rose et Ninette, 1891 ; La Petite paroisse, 1895; Le Soutien 
de famille, 1898. The humorous satires are : " Tartarin de Tarascon," 
1872 ; " Tartarin sur les Alpes," 1886 ; " Port-Tar ascon," 1890. "Entre 
les f rises et la rampe," 1894, is a collection of theatrical studies. 

Some idea of the relative popularity of these books may be gained 
from their sale. Up to the time of Daudet's death this was approx- 
imately as follows: Tartarin sur les Alpes, 188,000; Sapho, 166,000; 
Tartarin de Tarascon, 120,000; Le Nabab, 97,000; Fromont jeune 
et Risler aine, 95,000 ; LTmmortel, 94,000 ; Numa Roumestan, 77,000 ; 
Jack, 71,000 ; L'^vangeliste, 24,000 ; Les Rois en exil, 22,000. " Trente 
ans de Paris " had had a sale of 44,000. The other volumes of souve- 
nirs and stories averaged about 30,000. 



474 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

parties who, for the lack of game, shoot at caps that 
they toss in the air. A caged lion fires his imagina- 
tion, and insensibly his assumption of superior courage 
forces Tartarin-Quixote, much against the will of his 
other self, Tartarin-Sancho, to go to Algeria to hunt 
the lions that have long ceased to exist there. He 
returns, however, with a melancholy camel, almost 
persuaded that he has really done feats of heroism 
while enjoying an Oriental dolce far niente, and he 
seems to have earned for the rest of his life the privi- 
lege of dazzling the imagination of his worthy fellow- 
citizens when this story ends. The whole is one long 
piece of delicious persiflage by a Provencal of his 
brother Provencals, often perilously grazing the bur- 
lesque, but always saved from buffoonery by an unfail- 
ing tact that makes the reader feel that it is the comic 
side of truth, and not a caricature. 

Fourteen years later came " Tartarin sur les Alpes," 
the masterpiece of French humor in this century. 
Here Tartarin-Quixote has once more involved his 
brother Sancho in trouble, and to support his dignity 
as President of the Alpine Club, whose excursions are 
limited to the pleasant hill : sides of the Alpilles, he 
undertakes a trip to Switzerland with all the para- 
phernalia of an expert climber. The incongruity of the 
dangers conjured up by his Southern imagination with 
the prosaic tourist life that surrounds him forms the 
basis of the narrative, which introduces its protagonist 
with ice-pick, climbing-irons, snow-glasses, rope, and 
alpenstock, into the palatial hotel on the summit of 
the Eigi, where there is an elevator and a table d'hdte 
with six hundred guests. But the good-humored satire 
is by no means confined to Tartarin. It takes in all man- 
ner of Alpine tourists, from the English miss and the 



MODERN FICTION. — THE WANING OF NATURALISM. 475 

Eussian Nihilistic maiden to the shady spirits of the 
Jockey Club, and culminates in a colossal fancy of his 
fellow Tarasconian, Bornpard, the Swiss Exploitation 
Trust, which, according to him, keeps the country in 
order for visitors, and maintains crevasses so as to offer 
a pretence of danger. All of which Tartarin devoutly 
believes, and becomes as nonchalant in real peril as he 
was excited while hunting the tame chamois that was 
fed in the hotel kitchen and taught to exhibit itself on 
a cliff to attract strangers. At the close each Tarasco- 
nian thinks he has sacrificed the life of the other to 
his own safety by cutting the cord that united them, 
while both are safe and sound. Tartarin returns to 
Tarascon as Bompard is telling of his comrade's fate. 
The Alpine Club is a little dazed, but not so very 
much surprised, for Provencals understand one an- 
other. 

" Port-Tarascon," a story of colonization, is inferior 
to the Alpine Tartarin, though it is a delightful piece 
of work and has been well translated by Henry James. 
But Daudet must have felt that he had worked that 
vein out, for in this book he has brought Tartarin's 
life to a worthy close. It is interesting to study this 
side of Daudet's talent, where the poetic and romantic 
imagination of the " Amoureuses " and the " Fantaisies " 
finds a free scope still, while in the work that remains 
for us to consider we shall see it gradually subordinated 
to a realism more complete perhaps than that of any 
contemporary novelist. 

For in the " Parisian Dramas " Daudet was a most 
anxious student of real life ; and it is this truthfulness, 
this observation, in which all his novels strike their 
roots, that is the key to his strength. He departs 
from it at times, as will appear, but never without a 



476 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

conscious purpose, though never, perhaps, without loss. 1 
So when he is maturing his first novel, he studies its 
environment on the spot, takes lodgings among the 
factories, and lets this new life work upon him and 
for him. "Fromont jeune et Eisler aind" is a 
study of an honest and talented man whose efforts 
raise him socially into a society against the corruption 
of which he has no defence and from which he escapes 
only by suicide. In working his way from the shop 
to the counting-room and from poverty to wealth, 
Eisler has not acquired the social wisdom that might 
have guarded him from marriage with Sidonie, the 
fascinating but unscrupulous, ambitious, worldly, and 
revengeful Parisian of the struggling middle class. 
This evil genius is contrasted with the domestic sim- 
plicity of D^sirde Dolabelle and her mother, who adore 
the unappreciated talent of the decayed actor, her father, 
perhaps the most genially conceived character in the 
novel, with many suggestions of the happiest creations 
of Dickens, one of those rates who furnish the mark 
for the keenest shafts of irony in "Jack." Sidonie 
deceives her husband, degrades his brother, shatters 
Fromont's conjugal peace, and finds a congenial place 
at last on a dance-hall stage. The closing words of 
the book suggest that Daudet regards her as the 
natural product of her environment. 

"Jack," Daudet's next and longest novel, is called 
by its author " a work of pity, anger, and irony." This 
narrative of a whole storm-tossed existence shows 
greater breadth of conception and description, and also 
a greater sadness of tone ; for the tragedy, while less 

1 The episode of the Joyeuse family in " Le Nabab " is an instance, 
though even this has a kernel of truth. See Trente ans de Paris, 
p. 34. 



MODERN FICTION. — THE WANING OF NATURALISM. 477 

general, is more minute and harrowing. Paris is again 
the centre of the story, though its course takes the 
reader to Nantes, to the shipyards of Indret, and into 
the stoking-room of an ocean steamer. The central 
figure is an illegitimate child, petted and neglected at 
home, but never governed, and forced at last into a 
struggle for existence, for which he has been studiously 
unfitted, to be crushed by the thoughtlessness of his 
mother and the mean spirit of D'Argenton, the poet, 
who, with his attendant group of rates, the failures of 
literature and art, forms a sort of mutual admiration 
club envious only of recognized talent. In bringing 
Jack face to face with the sombre realities of a day- 
laborer's life, Daudet was first among the Natu- 
ralists to make an honest study of the condition of 
the great artisan class. This is at once the most novel 
and the most effective part of the book. The stoking- 
room, the wedding-feast at Saint-Mandd, the forge at 
Indret, are the scenes that cling longest to the memory, 
while the more romantically conceived friends of Jack, 
the humble Dr. Eivals, the ironworker Eoudic, and the 
camelot B^lisaire, grow dim beside the good-humored 
thoughtlessness of the mother, who spoils, neglects, 
betrays, and ruins the son she thinks she loves. 

" Le Nabab," two years later, shows a greater 
advance in epic and tragic power over " Jack " than 
"Jack" had done over "Fromont." Indeed, in its 
combination of the pathetic and > idyllic with playful 
humor and indignant satire, this is perhaps the most 
characteristic of all Daudet's novels. It owes no small 
part of its strength to the skill with which the author 
turned to account the observations of his years as 
secretary to the Due de Morny, whom he presented 
here as Mora, with other well-known figures in that 



478 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

strange social scum on the caldron of the Second 
Empire. Throughout, he has been faithful to the 
spirit of history if not to its letter. He tells us him- 
self in his preface that the Nabab recalls "a singular 
episode of cosmopolitan Paris fifteen years ago," and 
he refers us to the " Moniteur officiel " of February, 
1864, for a close parallel to the contest for the Nabab's 
Corsican seat, the chief difference being, though Daudet 
does not say so, that the true Nabab got his money in 
Egypt, in ways even more devious than those of 
Jansoulet, and that he got himself elected deputy for 
Gard three times by lavish use of money, only to 
find his election thrice annulled as a useless and 
inopportune scandal. The true Nabab lived for some 
years in poverty and contempt, and died after the fall 
of the Empire, — a denouement that Zola finds more 
tragic than that of the novel, though Daudet might 
reply that it is less dramatic. 

In Mora the Due de Morny is drawn by his private 
secretary with a kindly hand that hardly does justice 
to his cynical selfishness. " I have painted him," says 
the author, " as he loved to show himself in his Eiche- 
lieu-Brummel attitude. ... I have exhibited . . . the 
man of the world that he was and wished to be; 
assured, too, that while he was alive he would not 
have been displeased to be presented thus." And 
just as Mora is in the very letters of the name but a 
thin disguise for Morny, so Bois-Landry and Monpavon 
are but slightly altered names of men well known to 
the Paris of their time ; and critics claim to recognize 
the originals of Moessard, of Le Merquier, and of 
Hemerlingue. Felicia Euys was said by some to be 
studied from Sarah Bernhardt, though others as posi- 
tively deny the resemblance ; all agree that Cardailhac 



MODERN FICTION. — THE WANING OF NATURALISM. 479 

is the theatrical manager Roqueplan. In manner Jen- 
kins is Dr. Olliffe, but the famous arsenic pills belong 
to another physician, and the " Bethlehem " is taken 
almost literally from a report on u La Pouponnikre," 
an institution founded by equally philanthropic men 
with similar intentions and like results. 

In this essentially Parisian drama Daudet has 
drawn on his imagination almost solely for Madame 
Jenkins and her son Andrd, for De Gery, for Passajon, 
and for the Famille Joyeuse. Zola says that Daudet 
told him he thought this a wise concession to popu- 
lar taste, and seemed to imply that it was contrary 
to his own judgment, as it was to his critic's. The 
grotesque may be appropriately mingled with the 
tragic, but sentimental pathos of the "Tiny Tim" 
type, however skilfully done, does not deepen the 
impressive dignity of such scenes as the death and 
funeral of Mora, the stern satire of Jansoulet's end, 
or the broad, epic strokes of "Les Fetes du bey." 
Daudet continued to use similar contrasts in later 
novels, but they are less prominent and less sharp 
as the writer grew surer of his naturalism. 

His next novel, however, " Les Eois en exil," was of 
necessity less a product of personal observation than 
of popular report and of constructive imagination. 
Hence, from our study of Daudet's methods, it will 
cause no surprise to find him saying in his " Souvenirs " : 
" This is one of my books that gave me most trouble 
to set up, that I carried longest with me, kept in my 
head as a title and dim design as it appeared to me 
one evening on the Place du Carrousel through the 
tragic rent in the Parisian sky made by the ruins 
of the Tuileries." He wished, he says, to write the 
drama of princes self-exiled to the gay capital after 



480 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

their governmental bankruptcy, a book of modern 
history torn from the vitals of life, not excavated 
from the dust of archives. Many such rulers there 
were in the Paris of that day, from the notorious 
Isabella of Spain to the dignified and melancholy 
king of Hanover and the unsavory Francis II. of 
Naples, whose heroic German wife seems to have 
furnished more than one trait for the noble Queen 
Frdd^rique of the novel. The tragic beauty of this 
character, the greatest charm of the book, shows a 
more creative and clairvoyant vision than had appeared 
in any of his previous stories. Other characters were 
studied more directly from life ; for instance, Meraut, 
the too ardent legitimist, and that delightful exploiter 
of high life, Tom Ldvis ; but all of Daudet's exuberant 
imagination was needed to do justice to the reality of 
this product of the mad years of the closing Empire. 
Yet perhaps the most remarkable element in the book 
is its sympathetic charm, so great that it won praise 
alike from royalist and republican. 

But while, as a study of political psychology, the 
" Kings in Exile " has great merits, it marks no ad- 
vance over " Le Nabab " as a work of fiction. It 
bears constant witness to the slow and reluctant pro- 
cess of its production. The characters, especially 
Meraut and Fr^d^rique, may be more subtly drawn ; 
it is, indeed, just in this direction that Daudet will 
still make the greatest progress ; but yet we feel that 
we are moving in a realm of thought and interests 
foreign alike to him and to us, and, while the digni- 
fied pathos that befits the tale of the collapse of an 
ancient social order is not wanting, there are no scenes 
of such broad sweep and vivid color as were found in 
" Le Nabab." and reappeared in all their brilliancy in 
" Numa Koumestan." 



MODERN FICTION. — THE WANING OF NATURALISM. 481 

For while " ISTuma " is a Parisian drama, the author 
now turned for his inspiration to the sun of his native 
Provence, fusing for us the spirit of " Fromont " and 
of " Tartarin." Numa, the statesman whose Southern 
imagination finds it so easy to promise and so hard to 
keep, is so true to nature that every prominent poli- 
tician of the South of France seems to have seen some 
of his features in it, though few had the magnanimity 
of Gambetta to laugh at the thought of intentional 
portraiture. A more individualized study of the same 
race is the tambourinist Valmajour. He, as Daudet 
confesses, had his living parallel ; the rest were " bun- 
dles of diverse sticks," a phrase which he borrowed 
from Montaigne. The author tells us that he regards 
"Numa" as " the least incomplete of all his works," 
and in its structure and plot it is certainly more 
closely knit than the "Nabab," with its series of 
brilliant but disconnected scenes. He says, also, that 
it is the book into which he has put most invention, 
and contrasts it with the labored production of " Kings 
in Exile." 

It is probable that we should understand this, 
not as though he had been here more independent 
of those little note-books to which he often refers in 
his " Souvenirs," but rather that in " Numa " these 
observations seemed to him more completely and suc- 
cessfully fluxed in his mind. As a result of this, the 
story becomes more consecutive, more closely articu- 
lated, less a series of episodes, than the " Nabab," or 
the " Kings in Exile." There is here less breadth of 
narration, but an equal humor and a profounder analy- 
sis of character, while the tragic notes, if less deep, 
are more sustained. For the whole warp and woof of 
the book is a tragedy of effervescent optimistic imagi- 

31 



482 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

nation in its jostling with the realities of life. This 
generous emotion distorts the judgment of Numa, 
whose facile promises and light-hearted thoughtless- 
ness destroy the happiness of one existence after 
another, while his own buoyancy shields him in great 
measure from the troubles he causes, — a result that 
is quite true to nature. It is the same mental 
mirage that he had already studied from the comic 
side in " Tartarin " that appears here in its tragic 
aspects, while in the love of the consumptive Hor- 
tense the same psychologic condition is exhibited 
in its idyllic possibilities ; in the tambourinist Val- 
majour it is tragi-comic, and wholly comic in Bompard, 
a figure borrowed from " Tartarin." Opposed to all 
these in character is Eosalie, Numa's wife, who has 
enough Parisian clairvoyance to see the world as it 
is, but is not the happier for the vision. Nowhere had 
Daudet's satire been so delicate or so pitiless as in this 
book, which marks the beginning of the third phase of 
his genius, and in its peculiar excellence remained 
unsurpassed. 

"L'Evang^liste" continues the closer method of 
composition, and like all the later novels it is shorter 
than " Fromont," " Jack," or the " Nabab." Its author 
calls it an " observation " and a roman in distinc- 
tion from earlier drames, for it is more a psychological 
study than a novel of action, though its movement is 
most rapid and vigorous, and the whole seems written 
under the pressure of some personal emotion, realizing 
that rare combination " intensity of feeling and sage 
simplicity of execution." The morbid pathology of 
religious enthusiasm and ambition for spiritual domin- 
ion is exhibited in Madame Autheman and Mademoi- 
selle de Beuil ; its stern self-sacrifice and rooting out 



MODERN FICTION. — THE WANING OF NATURALISM. 483 

of human affections for what it calls the love of God 
is shown in the pitiful story of Eline Ebsen ; while as 
a foil to these Protestants the devout Catholic Henri- 
ette serves to illustrate the weakening of character 
that may arise from too great spiritual dependence. 
To positive, relentless, logical force of character the 
weaker and simpler natures yield, or are crushed. 
Never has Daudet been so pessimistic as here. All 
who win our sympathy end by claiming our pity. 
Madame Autheman drives her husband to suicide by 
her coldness ; she breaks the heart of Eline's mother 
and of her betrothed by nursing the young girl's 
religious fervor into monomania ; she wrecks the for- 
tunes of the good pastor Aussandon and the humble 
domestic joys of Eomain and Silvanine, who cross her 
path. The humor of the tale is wholly saturnine, the 
touch is light ; but the pen-point is sharp, its caustic 
mordant falls drop by drop on cant and hypocrisy, and 
exposes them by excoriation. 

" L'Evangdliste " was followed by " Sapho," the 
most widely circulated of Daudet's novels, partly be- 
cause of its literary strength, partly because its subject 
interested a wider audience. Dedicating his novel 
"To my sons when they are twenty," he proposed to 
show in it the dangers to heart, mind, character, and 
worldly success that spring from collage, that attempt 
at domestic life outside of legitimate marriage. This 
particular social ulcer seems a grave peril in France, 
but in Anglo-Saxon lands it has never been a serious 
menace, and so to us this story has less interest and 
value, in spite of its minute psycho-physiology, its 
serious purpose, and occasional passages of great 
strength, which are unrelieved here, as in " L'Evang^- 
liste " by lighter touches. But that this was due only 



484 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

to a self-imposed restraint, and that Daudet had lost 
none of his humorous power, was attested two years 
after " Sapho " in " Tartarin sur les Alpes." 

" L'Immortel " offers a more varied picture. Pri- 
marily it is a satire on myopic scholarship and the 
French Academy, a satire so obviously and inexpli- 
cably unjust that it blinds the reader at first to the 
real value of a work which none but Daudet could have 
written. The lightness of humor that seemed excluded 
by design from " Numa," " Sapho," and " L'Evangdliste," 
plays all through " L'Immortel " with lambent flames, 
making the whole a veritable " literary Ley den-jar." 
That episode at De Eosen's tomb, with its inscription, 
" Love is stronger than death," has a vis connect that 
makes it one of the best presentations in literature 
of a situation as old as civilization, and so true to 
human nature that we may trace it from China to 
mediaeval England. Here the widow in her weeds, 
like a nineteenth-century " Matron of Ephesus," receives 
the first caress of her new lover, who by a sudden 
inspiration, that is one of Daudet's happiest hits, has 
transferred his facile affections to her from her rival 
at the moment when both her disappointed ambition 
and his own are in need of consolation. There is an 
epic breadth, too, in the trial of Fage that had not 
been equalled since "Le Nabab." Yet on the whole 
the book is unsatisfactory. Not only is the object of 
attack unwisely chosen, the attack itself has not suffi- 
cient appearance of justice to carry our sympathy in 
spite of its partial foundation in fact. It seems hardly 
credible that the gullible Astier-Eehu should be of the 
Academy. In any case he is not typical of it. The 
intrigues of his wife are probable enough, but her con- 
temptuous discarding of Astier at the close is at least 



MODERN FICTION. — THE WANING OF NATURALISM. 485 

as inexplicable as it is cruel. Far more interesting 
are the secondary characters, Astier's son Paul, the 
" social struggler," the unscrupulous believer in the 
survival of the smartest, Freydet, the aristocratic 
aspirant for academic recognition, and the book- 
binder Fage, the evil genius of the book, who, like 
Tom Levis, recalls the exaggerated manner of Dickens. 
Interesting, too, is the introduction into the story of 
the author himself under the mask of Vedrine, and 
the thin disguise of his friend Zola as Dalzon. 

" L'Immortel " was followed by " Port-Tarascon," 
and this by "Rose et Ninette" (1891), a slighter study 
than its predecessors, but yet an analysis as careful 
and as earnest as any of them, of the effects of the 
then recent divorce laws connected with the name 
of Senator Naquet (1886), both on the separated 
parties and on their children who may be old enough 
to feel the changed and strained relations. 

In "La Petite paroisse" (1895), Daudet devoted 
his talent to a study of jealousy in its various shades 
from the voluble rage of Rosine and the tardy retro- 
spective prudence of the old forester, Sautecoeur, to 
its culmination in Richard, strong in body, weak in 
will, betrayed because despised. Daudet's last novel, 
" Soutien de famille," is in part the story of a modern 
Hamlet, oppressed by responsibility too great for his 
spirit, in part a bitterly sarcastic portrayal of political 
conditions under the Third Republic. 

Two features, one stylistic, the other ethical, are 
noteworthy in " La Petite paroisse." Here first Daudet 
adopted the symbolic method that Zola and Ibsen 
also use with such effect. The rhythmic recurrence 
of the little church marks every stage in the develop- 
ment of the theme over which it seems to preside. 



486 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

But still more significant is the recognition of the 
evangelical ethics of the Russian school as a present 
moral force in French society, before which the stern 
pessimism of the older Naturalists, with its retributive 
justice, deliquesces into sentimental pity and weak 
pardon, — another phase of the anaemia of the will, 
a sort of moral anaesthetic with which our fin de siecle 
is toying. Daudet, indeed, treats this spirit with deli- 
cate irony ; but yet he yields to it somewhat, and so 
the psychic analysis, both in the case of Richard and 
of his wife, Lydie, becomes much looser than is usual 
in the better work of this author. 

The general characteristics of Daudet's earlier 
manner are grace, charm, and pathos, all qualities 
that seem to belong to that sunny South of France 
which he has satirized so playfully in " Tartarin," so 
kindly in " Le Nabab," so sternly in " Numa Roumes- 
tan." To these elements he added, in growing meas- 
ure after 1871, a minute, careful observation, which 
gave him a keener insight into social wrongs, and 
changed his playful humor to bitter satire. But to 
this naturalistic temper he brought the mind of an 
idyllic poet, and it is this that differentiates him from 
Zola and his school, as well as from their predecessors, 
Stendhal and Balzac, and gives him many points of 
nervous contact with Dickens, so that his mind " gal- 
lops in the midst of the real, and now and again 
makes sudden leaps into the realm of fancy;" for, 
as Zola says, "nature has placed him where poetry 
ends, and reality begins.' , This poet's vision gives to 
much of Daudet's work the appearance of a kindly 
optimism that prefers, even in evil, to see the ridicu- 
lous rather than the base, though in his later work 
he separated these elements, and became either frankly 



MODERN FICTION. — THE WANING OF NATURALISM. 487 

humorous or profoundly earnest. But a permanent 
result of his temperament was that his satire kept 
to the last much of the irony that originally char- 
• acterized it almost altogether. This irony is the 
hardest to seize, the most evanescent of all literary 
forms, but it is one of the most charming of all ; and, 
in one with as keen a sense of humor as Daudet, one 
of the most effective. It betrays its possessor, how- 
ever, into a greater subjectivity, more expression of 
personal sympathy for his characters, than is consis- 
tent with the canons of strict naturalism. This is 
especially noticeable in " Fromont " and " Jack," but 
Numa and Astier win his sympathy at the last, and 
his Nabab has it from the first in spite of all his faults 
and foibles. Yet his subjectivity is more veiled than 
that of Dickens, and often suggests the more delicate 
processes of Thackeray. 

The poetic element, as has been shown, was most 
prominent in the earlier work, and it is in this that we 
find the greatest care for form. An analysis of even 
the slighter sketches will reveal conscientious elabo- 
ration in structure and phraseology, though the artist 
in him preserved his work from the extreme meticu- 
lousness of Flaubert. But when we come to the 
longer novels, we shall find this care more manifested 
in the working up of single episodes than in the struc- 
ture of the whole. He had not the architectural power 
of Zola, but rather the style of an impressionist painter. 
In many ways he suggests a comparison with Millet. 
For just as such a painter might be willing to sacrifice 
photographic realism to effect, so the word-painter 
allows himself liberties with the dictionary and a pic- 
turesque freedom in the use of tenses, though more 
sparingly in the novels that follow " Numa Koumes- 



488 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

tan," and these artifices produce delicate shades of im- 
pression, the causes of which quite escape the ordinary 
reader. 1 

All that can be observed — the individual picture, 
scene, character — Daudet will render with wonderful 
accuracy, and the later novels show an increasing firm- 
ness of touch, limpidity of style, 2 and wise simplicity 
in the use of the sources of pathetic emotion, such as 
befits the cautious Naturalist. But the transitions 
from episode to episode or from scene to scene are in 
the earlier novels often strangely abrupt, suggesting 
the manner of the Goncourts. It seems at times as 
though Daudet were in haste to pass over the treacher- 
ous quicksand of fancy to the sure ground of the hu- 
man document. As a rule one of these novels is a 
series of carefully elaborated chapters ; but the reader 
must make for himself the leap from one to another, 
must be prepared for abrupt changes of scene and time, 
and even for developments in character of which the 
text will afford only a hint or passing allusion. It is 
not easy, for instance, to account for the acts or 
thoughts of Countess Padovani in " L'Immortel," nor 
for those of Felicia in " Le Nabab," without summon- 
ing imagination to supplement the material given us ; 
not indeed that their conduct seems inexplicable or 
improbable, but only that the author asks the co- 
operation of his readers. Then, too, especially in the 
earlier novels the action is interrupted by the intrusion 

1 Brunetiere, 1. c. pp. 90, 94, 108, illustrates and develops these 
ideas with much ingenuity. Of course the word " impressionist " is 
not used here in its narrower technical sense. 

' 2 Such a sentence as that beginning " Oh ! vers trois heures," and 
stretching over more than a page of " Le Nabab" (pp. 215-217) to 
end in an anacoluthon, would be sought in vain in any novel after 
" L'Evangeliste." 



MODERN FICTION. — THE WANING OF NATURALISM. 489 

of episodes interesting in themselves, but unduly elabo- 
rated in view of the general plan. 

It is not clear how much of this lack of close articu- 
lation is due to the method of composition. Daudet 
tells us that he sketched out his first drafts at white 
heat, living his scenes, and of course laying stress on 
the high lights in his canvas. Then, when once the 
characters are all alive in his mind, he sets them to 
work, " he gives us what has made his heart beat and 
his nerves throb, and his . personages are dramatic and 
picturesque because they have lived in his mind." * 
These are not novels with a purpose, starting from 
some preconceived conception; they are the result of 
that " multitude of little note-books," always with him 
and always accumulating new material. Around a 
central figure others group themselves ; the notes be- 
come a book. " After nature," he said, " I never had 
any other method." And that he may attain this the 
more fully, he denies himself a too careful revision of 
the general scheme of his work, hastening to commit 
the early chapters to print lest the whole should lose 
through elaboration its passion, sympathy, and straight- 
forward natural diction. 2 Over details, however, he 
works slowly; and he told Mr. Sherard that he 
wrote "each manuscript three times over, and would 
write it as many times more if he could." 

These native qualities combined with this method 
eventually produced a style that attains the highest 
effects of art without artificiality, and is at once clas- 
sical and modern. In this, as in much else, Daudet 
forms an instructive contrast to Zola, his greatest con- 

1 Trente ans de Paris, p. 280. Cp. also Pellissier, p. 351, who 
seems to have borrowed from Zola. 

2 Trente ans de Paris, p. 283. 



490 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

temporary in French fiction, " of the same school but 
not of the same family." Zola is methodical, Daudet 
spontaneous. Zola works with documents, Daudet 
from the living model. Zola is objective, Daudet with 
equal scope and fearlessness shows more personal feel- 
ing and hence more delicacy. And in style also, Zola 
is vast, architectural ; Daudet slight, rapid, subtle, 
lively, suggestive. Both have in them elements of the 
poet and idealist ; but Zola is essentially epic, Daudet 
more idyllic. And, finally, in their philosophy of life, 
Zola inspires a hate of vice and wrong, Daudet wins 
a love for what is good and true. Zola's pessimism 
may be a tonic for strong minds, Daudet's is less 
likely to be misunderstood, 1 w x hile in them both there 
is a noble earnestness that we miss in the later Natural- 
ists or the decadent Psychologists, in Maupassant and 
in all but the latest work of Bourget, Prdvost, and 
Margueritte. 

The genius of Daudet and Zola compels popular 
recognition as well as critical consideration. The only 
living French novelist whose books have a circulation 
approaching theirs is Georges Ohnet, a writer whose 
popularity is more interesting than his stories because 
it explains, though it does not excuse, the contempt 
of the Goncourts for the favor of the great public, and 
also because it shows how the crassest form of Ko- 

1 The optimistic note of the earlier work was so far dominated 
by the pessimistic, especially after " Le Nabab," that Pellissier's 
classification of Daudet as an optimist, though seconded by Lemaitre, 
seems hardly justified. It is, of course, true that pathos implies 
optimism ; but this is precisely the element that was most subor- 
dinated in the work of the third period, until " La Petite paroisse " 
gave promise of a fourth manner. With the above parallel between 
Daudet and Zola may be compared Pellissier, p. 349, to whom I owe 
several suggestions. 



MODERN FICTION. — THE WANING OF NATURALISM. 491 

manticism retains its hold on the great mass of readers, 
be the spirit of the time never so naturalistic. Of 
Ohnet it is sufficient to remember, first, that he is 
popular, then that each phrase of the following appre- 
ciation of his talent by Jules Lemaitre is so true that 
I know not how to better his instruction. "You 
find in him," says this genial critic, ''the elegance of 
the chromo, the nobility of clock-bronzes, the posing 
of a strolling actor, smirking optimism, Eomantic sen- 
timentality, high-breeding as the concierge's daughters 
conceive it, aristocracy as Emma Bovary imagines it, 
elegant style as M. Homais comprehends it. It is 
Feuillet without grace or delicacy, Cherbuliez without 
wit or philosophy, Theuriet without poetry or frankness, 
the triple essence of banality. " 1 

But while Ohnet was gaining the ear of the com- 
mercial class and the great bourgeoisie, the frivolity 
of the aristocracy found a voice in the short stories 
of Lavedan, inferior to Maupassant's in stylistic 
beauty and self-restraint, but equal to those master- 
pieces in delicate irony, and superior perhaps in wit, 
which is a somewhat rare quality in contemporary 
France, and will be so long as the negative influences 
of Kenan's aristocratic pessimism prevail over the old 
sane and sound esprit gaulois. Nor should we be 
wholly silent concerning that other sparkling mirror of 
aristocratic frivolity, Gyp, 2 a great-grand-niece of the 

1 Lemaitre, Contemporains, i. 354. Ohnet was born 1848. Chro- 
nology of his chief novels : Serge Panine, 1881 ; Le Maitre des forges, 
1882; La Comtesse Sarah, 1883; Lise Fleuron, 1884; La Grande 
Marniere, 1885; Volonte, 1888; Docteur Rameau, 1889. 

2 Born, as Vapereau discreetly notes, "vers 1850." Characteristic 
volumes are: Petit Bob, 1882; Autonr du mariage, 1883; Mile. 
Loulou, 1888; La Bassinoire, 1909. 



492 MODEKN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

Kevolutionary orator Mirabeau. Her books, like the 
society in which she moves, are full of blague, light- 
hearted insouciance, and an irony always barbed and 
stinging and often malicious as well. Hers is a wit 
without reverence, a talent without sincerity, artistic or 
ethical. Thus she unites the charm and the poison 
of that exquisite fin de siecle whose luxury is ever 
merging in a corruption that has found a sternly 
prophetic denunciator in De Vogu£, the translator of 
Tolstoi, with his earnest and growing " Neo-Christian " 
school. 

Pierre Loti, 1 who since 1880 has charmed a cul- 
tured public with exotic sketches and in 1891 suc- 
ceeded Feuillet in the French Academy, brought to 
strange horizons an exquisite power of observation 
that gives him a place unchallenged and apart in his 
generation. Description is the charm of all his works, 
but their fascination is increased by an exquisitely 
vague melancholy, more sincere than Chateaubriand's, 
more frank and honest in its self-revelation. Indeed, 
in " Le Eoman d'un enfant " he seems almost eager to 
lay before the world the progress of his soul from 

1 Loti is the pseudonym of Pierre Viaud, who was born in 1850, and 
has been connected with the navy since 1867. Chronology and scenes 
of his chief works: Aziyade ( Constantinople), 1879; Le Mariage de 
Loti (Tahiti), 1880; Roman d'un spahi (Algeria), 1881; Mon frere 
Ives (ocean and Brittany), 1883: Les Trois dames de la Kasbah 
(Algeria), 1884: Le Pechenr d'Islande (Iceland), 1886; Madame 
Chrysantheme (Japan), 1887 ; Au Maroc (Morocco), 1890: Le Desert 
(Syria), 1895; La Galile'e (Palestine), 1895; Ramuntcho, 1897; 
Matelot, 1898; Les Derniers jours de Pekin, 1901; L'Inde, 1903; 
Vers Ispahan, 1904 ; La Troisieme jeunesse de Mme. Prune, 1905 ; Les 
Desenchantees, 1906; La Mort de Philse, 1908. Partly autobio- 
graphical are : Le Roman d'un enfant, 1 890, and Le Livre de pitie et 
de la mort, 1891. 

Criticism : Lemaitre, Contemporains, iii. 91 ; Doumic, Ecrivains 
d'aujourd'hui ; Revue bleue, February, 1895. 



I 



MODERN FICTION. — THE WANING OF NATURALISM. 493 

Protestant severity through Catholic beauty to pes- 
simistic doubt, to the " horrible consciousness of the 
vanity of vanities and the dust of dusts." 

This pessimism was not new, but in him first it re- 
vealed itself in a receptive sympathy for the rare and 
exotic experiences that his naval life brought to him 
in richer measure than had fallen to the lot of Ber- 
nardin or Chateaubriand ; but neither of these writers 
shows Loti's delicate sensitiveness to exotic nature as it 
is reflected in the foreign mind and heart. What a 
strange yet what a real world he has conjured up for 
us in " Loti's Marriage/' — Otaheite, that Eden of the 
senses, a veritable Isle of Avalon, where all seems joy- 
ous ease, where love is but the fulfilment of nature's 
law, and sin is unknown, because there is no ungrati- 
fied desire ! How sweetly simple, how morally infan- 
tile, is Loti's bride, Earahu ! And with what firm 
delicacy the author shows us how his hero has brought 
with him from our western world not only the burden 
but the dignity of a life of struggle with nature and 
self that drives him at last from dreamful ease to active 
life, grieved at heart but clarified in mind ; for this may 
be sweeter, but that is higher. 

Less vague but as strange is the devouring passion 
and tragic fatality of the Turkish " Aziyadd ; " and 
this pessimistic determinism grows still deeper in " A 
Spahi's Eomance," where Fatou-gaye is a true bete 
humaine, sunk in moral slumber or quivering with 
ferocious joys. Here the very landscape is cruel, 
sterile, desolating, hardly more barren beneath its blind- 
ing sun than the broad reaches of ocean, whose spirit, 
vast and indefinable, gives a unique charm to " My 
Brother Ives " and " The Iceland Fisherman," probably 
artistically his strongest works, severely simple in drama 



494 MODEKN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

and situation, but wonderful in the subtly conveyed 
sensations of Breton village scenes or of tropic and 
polar seas. Then follows "Madame Chrysanthfeme," 
that enigmatical little Japanese, so naive in her im- 
morality, as incomprehensible and as fascinating as 
Fatou-gaye or Aziyad^, and inferior only to the incom- 
parable Earahu. It is astonishing how beneath the 
artist's hand the whole Japanese environment has be- 
come real, not externally in photographic pictures, but 
in its inner nature. Loti gives us the impression less 
of a country than of a life, a mode of mental and moral 
being unlike any we have known. 

The means by which he produces these remarkable 
effects are, as with all great artists, extremely simple. 
The style is direct, the vocabulary small, the moral 
situations familiar, the characters not complex. But 
this very simplicity strikes the key-note of the semi- 
civilization he describes, and aids that approximation 
of the primitive and the present, of our complexity 
with their simplicity, that gives Loti's work its peculiar 
charm. But his place is unique, apart from the normal 
lines of novelistic development. He has no immediate 
literary ancestor, and he has no pupil worthy the name. 

Bourget 1 brings us back to the direct line of Nat- 

1 Born 1852. Poetry: La Vie inquiete, 1874; Edel, 1878; Les 
Aveux, 1882. Criticism and travel: Essais de psychologie, 1883; 
Nouveaux essais, 1885; Etudes et portraits (2 vols.), 1888, 1889; 
Psychologie de Tamour moderne, 1890; Sensations d'ltalie, 1891; 
Nouveaux pastels, 1891 ; Outre-mer, 1895. Fiction : L'Irreparable, 
1884; Cruelle enigme, 1885; Un Crime d'amour, 1886; Andre Cor- 
nells, 1887; Mensonges, 1887; Le Disciple, 1889; La Terre promise, 
1892 ; Cosmopolis, 1892 ; Un Scruple, 1893 ; Steeplechase andUn Saint, 
1894 ; Une Idylle tragique, 1896 ; La Duchesse bleue, 1898 ; Drames de 
famille, 1899 ; Le Fantome, 1901 ; L'Etape, 1902 ; Monique, 1902; Un 
Divorce, 1904 ; L'fimigre, 1907 ; Detours de cceur (short stories), 1908. 

Criticism : Lemaitre, Contemporains, iii. 339, iv. 291 ; Doumic, 



MODERN FICTION. — THE WANING OF NATURALISM. 495 

alistic decadence. He carries realistic observation 
beyond the externals that fixed the attention of Zola 
and Maupassant to states of the mind, and thus strives 
to unite the method of Stendhal to that of Balzac, 
Indeed it is to him and the psychological school that 
has gathered around him that Stendhal owes his re- 
nascent fame. Bourget began his literary career as 
a reviewer. A volume of verses published at twenty- 
two earned him from Emile Augier the name of 
" melancholy pig," but a few years later he reappeared 
with riper mind and to far better advantage in literary 
essays on the writers who had most influenced his own 
development, — the philosophers Eenan, Taine, and 
Amiel ; the poets Baudelaire and Leconte de Lisle ; the 
dramatist Dumas fils, and the novelists Turgenieff, 
the Goncourts, and Stendhal. Here a studious disposi- 
tion and the complete control of very varied and wide 
reading stood him in good stead ; but these qualities 
that won him critical recognition militated against his 
success as a novelist or poet, for in these fields crea- 
tive imagination was demanded rather than scholarly 
analysis. 

Bourget calls himself a " moralist of the decadence/' 
and again " a maniac of psychology and a passionate 
lover of analysis." But if he has been a moralist, he 
set up in none of his early novels any claim to be 
a reformer. His diagnosis was always brilliant, but 
he offered no balm for the wound he probed. Thus 
his criticism showed the blight that Kenan and the 
dilettante skeptics cast on all who fell under their 
shadow. His fiction bears first strong, then feebler 

Ecrivains d'aujourd'hui ; France, La Vie litteraire, i. 348; Pellissier, 
Essais de litterature contemporaiue, 221 ; Deschamps, La Vie et les 
livres, 61 ; Revue bleue, June, 1894, and March, 1895. 



496 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

marks of Kenan's influence. An English reviewer has 
called it " a seductive if sofriewhat sickly product of 
the hot-house of an outworn civilization." It unites 
intellectual keenness with a morbid sensitiveness and 
an imagination that loves to twine itself in the rosy 
bonds of " Les Liaisons dangereuses." La Clos, as 
Doumic says, is Bourget's breviary. His work deals 
almost exclusively with high-life, chiefly of Paris, but 
also of those cosmopolitan types that he studied in 
visits to Italy, England, and America. At first there 
was certainly no small dose of snobbishness in the 
delight with which he gloated over the details of lux- 
ury, over silk stockings, wondrous in woof and shade, 
and the various patterns of a corsage. But he soon 
grew aware of this error of taste, and in the "Psy- 
chology of Modern Love" more than once made fun 
of his former work ; but possibly the blagueur was less 
sincere than the snob. " Mensonges " marks a car- 
dinal point in his fiction. Up to that time he had 
seen environment more clearly than characters; here 
the interest shifts to morbid psycho-pathology, and 
from this point on his characters become more and 
more, like Stendhal's, " different" from normal clay. 
Bourget wishes to satisfy Taine's demand, to make the 
novel a document of moral history ; but like him 
he finds the abnormal most significant. This, however, 
is true for fiction only so long as the characters retain 
an independent will. Men such as Larcher and Ney- 
rac 1 are wearisome to any but an alienist. 

In their ethics the novels of Bourget's second 
period are pessimistic. The triumph is with cynical 
selfishness. Common-sense morality does, indeed, 

1 Larcher in " Mensonges " and " Psychologie de Tamour mo- 
derne ; " Neyrac in " La Terre promise." 



MODERN FICTION. — THE WANING OF NATURALISM. 497 

occasionally find a voice in this psychological wilder- 
ness, as when in " Mensonges " Madame Moraines with 
her " lover for money, her lover for love, and her lover 
for show," having been described by the future psy- 
chologist of modern love as "a complicated sort of 
animal," the Abb£ answers : " Complicated ! She is 
just a wretch who lives at the mercy of her sensations. 
All that — it *s just dirt." And lest we should mis- 
apprehend the lesson we are given a glimpse of how 
it all came out in " Modern Love." The lady has 
changed lovers but not manners, the lover is resigned 
to his bonds, and Monsieur qui paye is enjoying a green 
old age, frosty but kindly, the friend of everybody. 
Maupassant's pessimism had been deeper, more sombre 
and earnest. This has a false note of flippant cyni- 
cism that prepares the reader for the alleged conversion 
announced in " Cosmopolis," and continued through 
" Une Idylle tragique " and " L'Btape," to " Un Di- 
vorce " and " L'l£migr£." Here Bourget has fallen in with 
the wave of popular reaction toward religious sentiments 
and curiosity, if not precisely toward Christian creeds, 
that came to France from the Eussians, and showed 
itself in Daudet's " Petite paroisse," as well as in the fic- 
tion of the " Revue des deux mondes " under Brunetifere ; l 
but there is always a false note in Bourget' s Catholicism, 
a savor of the senuous mysticism of Baudelaire. 

Intent as Bourget always seems on catching and 
conveying "states of soul," his style is apt to reflect 
the quality of its subject. It is extremely uneven, 
now simple, now mannered to the verge of affectation, 
sinking at times to careless solecisms, but capable of 
rising, on occasion, to a terse and nervous concision 

1 See his pamphlet u La Science et la religion " (1895). 
32 



498 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

that unites in singular measure strength and beauty. 1 
In this, as in much else, he stands in close relation to 
his literary godchild Barrfes, at the protracted birth of 
whose reputation Bourget actively assisted. 

Maurice Barrfes 2 represents a movement among the 
literary pessimists to throw off the moral lethargy 
of Eenanism. That his effort was a partial failure 
does not detract from its significance, and it has not 
been without influence on the considerable section of 
" Young France " that is deaf to the voice of the Neo- 
Christian altruists. For, with a desire not uncommon 
in the decade of the 80's, to find a new path and 
invent a new shibboleth, he proclaimed his " cultus 
of the ego," the doctrine of individualism, which, he 
tells us in the preface to u Berenice's Garden," we 
must guard from philistine intrusion, recreate daily, 
and direct in harmony with the universe. Is Barres 
in earnest or is he mocking when he calls these early 
novels " spiritual memoirs," and asks " why a genera- 
tion disgusted with much, perhaps with everything 
except toying with ideas, should not try metaphysical 
romances " ? Surely charity bids us take him for a 
laughing philosopher when he brings his fair promises 
to the lame conclusion that to expand with sincerity 
souls must have leisure, and hence that the pursuit of 
wealth is for the present the suitable attitude for 
" spirits careful of the inner life." Later political 

1 Cp. Lemaitre, 1. c. p. 339. 

2 Born 1862. Journalist since 1883. Essays : Sensations de Paris, 
1888; Le Quartier Latin, 1888; Huit jours chez M. Renan, 1888- 
Fiction: Sous l'ceil des barbares, 1888; Un Homme libre, 1889; Le 
Jardin de Berenice, 1890; Le Roman de Fenergie nationale ; Les 
De'racines, 1897 ; L'Appel au soldat, 1900 ; Leurs figures, 1902 ; Collette 
Baudoche, 1908. Drama: Une Journe'e parlementaire, 1894. Criti- 
cism : Huneker, Egoists, pp. 207-235. 



MODERN FICTION. — THE WANING OF NATURALISM. 499 

experience gave him greater earnestness, and in the 
series " Le Eoman de l'dnergie nationale " he has done 
his part to aid social reform in France. 

Beginning their literary career under Naturalistic 
influences, from which they soon emancipated them- 
selves, are the Bofex brothers, who under the name J. H. 
Eosny have written forceful studies of manners inspired 
by social and humanitarian interests. 1 Here, too, may 
be named the Swiss Eod, a sober moralist, remarkable 
for the subtle analysis and delicate feeling of his studies 
of conscience, as may be well seen in "Le M^aage du 
Pasteur Naudi&" There is fine irony expressed in a 
style of remarkably lucid precision in the fiction of 
Anatole France (p. 301) and in " 1/ Armature " and other, 
novels of Paul Hervieu before he turned to the drama. 
Noteworthy too are A. Hermanns "Memoirs pour servir 
k Thistoire de la soci&£," a series of novels among which 
" Les Grand bourgeois " and " La Discorde " are typical. 
In gentler vein are the stories of Madame Bentzon 2 and 
Pierre de Coulevain, 3 and in the novels of Ben£ Bazin 4 
the religious controversies of recent years find an echo. 
Notable, too, are L£on Cladel's somber and often tragic 
stories of rural life, such as " Le Bouscassi6 " and the 
more idyllic pastorals of Pouvillon. 5 ^douard Estau- 
nie's " La Vie Secrete " (1908) revealed a hitherto un- 
suspected power and Jean Aicard has created a new 
Tartarin in his "Maurin des Maures," (1908). But 
the strongest work and the best promise of recent years 

1 E. g. Marc Fane ; Le Termite ; Daniel Valgraive. 

2 Un Divorce, 1871 ; Emancipee, 1887 ; Constance, 1891 ; Tchelovec, 
1900, are typical. 

3 Au Cceur de la vie, 1909. 

4 Les Oberle, 1901 ; Donatienne, 1903 ; L'Isolee, 1905 ; Le Ble que 
leve, 1907 ; Le Mariage de Mile. Gimel, 1909, are typical. 

5 E. g. Cesette, Les Antibel and Petites ames (short stories). 



500 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

is to be found in the fiction of Marcel Provost and Paul 
Margueritte. 

Marcel Provost 1 seemed at first the most hopeful 
pupil of Bourget, but soon proved his chief rival, 
making shrewd use of the psychologist camaraderie, 
but freeing himself speedily from the trammels of 
literary coteries and theories, at first bent rather on 
following, then on guiding, the currents of intellectual 
life. So when in " Conchette " he urged the claims 
of Eomanticism, asserting that " the positive and the 
Eomantic novel were only two expressions of the same 
reality," he was no prophet crying in the Naturalistic 
wilderness as he would have been ten years earlier, 
•but rather a sagacious prognosticator of a popular 
favor, already w T eary alike of aristocratic " states of 
soul" and plebeian states of life. He was not dis- 
posed, however, to sacrifice his growing popularity to 
this, or indeed to any literary theory, proposing to 
himself for the present no higher aim than to amuse 
the public and himself, 2 and to this he has remained 
faithful, posing no longer as a moralist, 3 but rather as 
a keen blagueur of society, an amateur collector of the 
distortions of love. All his books before 1900 show a 
standing contrast between the man in whom love 

1 Born 1862. Fiction: Le Scorpion, 1887; Conchette, 1888; 
Mile. Jaufre, 1889 ; La Cousine Laure, 1890 ; La Confession <Tun 
amant, 1891 ; Lettres des femmes, 1892 ; Nouvelles lettres des femmes, 
1893 ; L'Automne d'une femme, 1893 ; Demi-vierges, 1894 ; Le Jardin 
secret, 1897 ; Les Vierges fortes, 1900 ; Lettres a Francoise, 1902 ; La 
Princesse d'Erminge, 1905; M. et Mme. Moloch, 1906; Lettres a 
Francoise Mariee (1908). Drama: La Plus faible, 1904. Criticism: 
Bertaut, Marcel Prevost, 1904. 

2 Preface to " Cousine Laure." 

8 In " Demi-vierges " he does indeed pose as a moralist once more, 
but it is as a moralist pour rire. 



MODERN FICTION. — THE WANING OF NATURALISM. 501 

becomes a senile weakness and him in whom it re- 
mains a physical function. Amadou, Louiset, Maxime 
de Chantel, Fr^ddric, are dragged down by it mor- 
ally and intellectually. Moriceau, Claeys, Hector Le 
Tessier, O'Kent, cynics all, are suggested for admira- 
tion and imitation ; and the last of these sums up the 
new world- wisdom in the dictum that "love has no 
intrinsic morality, is neither noble nor shameful, but 
purely selfish." 

The interest of Provost's work lies almost wholly in 
analysis of the feminine mind, and finds its extreme 
flowering in the " Lettres des femraes" and in "Demi- 
vierges." He is always clever in conception, skilful 
in construction. His style is easy and flowing, but 
yet characterized by a singular combination of simple 
sentiment and graceful delicacy with astonishing tours 
deforce in brutality of expression. There is a ten- 
dency to redundancy and repetition, and, as in so 
many men of talent in this generation, there is occa- 
sionally an undeniable slovenliness of diction, probably 
the result of over-hasty production. There are graver 
faults than these, however. The brilliancy of his an- 
alysis often masks faulty assumptions ; his characters 
act from strained or insufficient motives ; his women 
are too neuropathic to rouse a sympathetic interest. 
They are too irresponsible, too much the creatures of 
their emotional instincts, the instruments of nature, 
without discipline or morality. With the turn of 
the century, however, his work underwent a great 
change. It became more earnest, more sincere in its 
ethics, more purposeful, too, as he began to interest 
himself in social reform, especially as it affected the 
position of women in France. This may be seen es- 
pecially in "Lettres k Franchise" and the "Lettres & 



502 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

Frangoise Marine," though M. et Mme. Moloch showed 
that it might not prove a sustained flight. 

For Paul Margueritte x the prognostic may be more 
confident. He had, indeed, a less promising literary- 
birth, but a much more healthy development. His 
early work was naturalistic a outrance. No writer of 
that school has been more minute than he in observa- 
tion and description of the details of every-day actions. 
At first he sometimes abused this talent, descending 
to Eabelaisian details and episodes of Saphism that go 
about as far in the analysis of dirt as it is granted to 
any writer to penetrate who does not leave his aesthetic 
sense behind. His early work shows also a disposition 
to introspective revery ; but in later books these tend- 
encies are restrained by a riper mind and clarified by 
a cleaner taste, and his art is dignified by a higher 
purpose and a deeper sense of the responsibilities of 
literature to morals. 

With this growing seriousness his work becomes 
more attractive, but his style continues restless, ner- 
vous, uneven. It proceeds by fits and starts, suggests 
the eager searcher rather than the confident guide, 
though it flashes often with penetrating observations. 
Margueritte feels profoundly the unsolved enigmas of 

1 Born 1860. Son of the general whose heroic death at Sedan is 
commemorated in Zola's " Debacle." Fiction: Mon pere, 1 884 ; Tous 
quatre, 1885; La Confession posthume, 1886; Maison ouverte, 1887; 
Pascal Gafosse, 1889; Jours d'e'preuve, 1889; Amants, 1890; La 
Force des choses, 1891; Sur le retour, Le Cuirassier blanc, 1892; 
Ma grande, 1893; La Tourmente, 1894; Fors l'honneur, 1895; Simple 
histoire (Nouvelles}, 1895 ; L'Essor, 1906; Le Desastre, 1908; Femmes 
nouvelles, 1899 ; Les Troncons du glaive, 1900 ; Les Braves gens, 1901 ; 
Le Jar din du roi, 1902; Les Deux vies, 1902; La Commune, 1904; 
Le Prisme, 1905. 

Criticism : Pellissier, Litterature contemporaine : Lemaitre, Con- 
temporains, v. 30. 



MODERN FICTION. — THE WANING OF NATURALISM. 503 

life, but he has come to reject the sedative of pessi- 
mism. Haunted, as he tells us, by a sentiment of mys- 
tery from childhood, he was one of the first to suspend 
judgment. He balanced for a time between an instinc- 
tive assertion of the will that characterizes all healthy 
youth, and a morbid doubt of the worth of freedom due 
to his determinist environment that made him question 
at times whether we were not " involuntary actors and 
powerless witnesses of the slow indefinable evolution of 
ourselves." 1 But at his best and at last he has had the 
courage to proclaim that no one has a right " to leave a 
great responsibility to chance or destiny," that "the 
greatest misfortunes come from lack of will ; " 2 and in 
those words he has found the disease and shown the 
remedy for the neuropathic culture of modern France. 

It is inspiriting to see this son of one who won 
renown by a glorious death at Sedan, enfranchising 
himself by the power of his own genius from mental 
anasmia and moral lethargy. His "Pascal Gavosse" 
ends with a call to work. " Jours d'^preuve " in its 
study of the humbler aspects of bourgeois life has laid 
aside Flaubert's contempt for Dickens' sympathy with 
that "lowly happiness, narrow and resigned but sure,'' 
despite poverty and disappointed ambition. " La Force 
des choses " is even more tonic in its healthy morality, 
and if in " Sur le retour " he returned for a time to a 
more artificial psychology and tried to throw a new 
light on the old observation that " crabbed age and 
youth cannot live together," he recovered his healthier 
tone in "Ma grande," a sound, clean story of loving 
jealousy in which he has involved a delightful parody 
of the Symbolists. This same strong, hopeful note 

1 Alger Thiver, 1891. 

2 " Force des choses " and " Jours d'epreuve." 



504 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. 

rings through " Fors 1'honneur," and is the inspiration of 
" L'Essor " and of the series of patriotic novels in col- 
laboration with his brother Victor, begun with " Le 
D^sastre " and continued in " Les Tron^ons du glaive," 
" Les Braves gens/' and " La Commune," all stories of 
the Terrible Year, 1870-1871. Meantime the brothers 
had written " Le Jardin du roi," a charming idyl of 
Versailles, and were beginning to engage in the struggle 
for the further emancipation of women in the novels 
" Ferames nouvelles," " Les Deux vies," and " Le 
Prisme," as well as in pamphlet discussions of social 
subjects. The recent work of these sons of the hero 
of Sedan, purposeful, sane, and patriotic, suggests the 
evolution from the present novelistic chaos of a new, 
profounder, and purified realism. 



INDEX. 



Embracing authors, with the dates of birth and death and the titles of the 
more important works. The article and its compounds are treated as integral 
parts of names, but not of titles. The preposition de is neglected in both cases. 



Abbe" Tigrane (Fabre), 420. 
Adam de la Halle. See La Halle. 
Aicaird, J. (1848- ), 499. 

Alembert, D' (1717-1783), 104. 
Alexander, Legends of, 4. 
Alexandrine verse, 4, 35, 26, 79, 101. 
Alexis, P. (1851-1901), 457. 
Allemagne (De Stael), 129-134. 
Amadis of Gaui, 23. 
Amoureuses (Daudet), 470, 476. 
Amyot, J. (1513-1593), 23. 
Angelo (Hugo), 215. 
Annee terrible (Hugo), 230, 244. 
Antoine de la Salle. See La Salle. 
Armance (Stendhal), 410. 
Art d'etre grand-pere (Hugo), 247. 
Arthur, Legends of, 3. 
Assommoir (Zola). 451, 456, 472. 
Atala (Chateaubriand), 138, 142. 
Aubigne\ A. d' (1551-1630), 26. 
Augier, t. (1820-1889), 98, 99, 281, 
356-369, 372, 388, 423. 

Baif, J.-A. (1532-1589), 26. 

Balzac, H. de (1799-1850), 108, 170, 

191, 396, 404, 405, 411, 413, 414-427, 

432, 443. 
Balzac, J. de (1594-1654), 57, 81. 
Banville, T. de (1820-1891), 275, 304- 

309, 392. 
Barante, A.-G.-P. de (1782-1866), 267, 

272. 
Barbes, A. (1809-1870), 402. 
Barbier, H.-A. (1805-1882), 173. 
Barnave, A.-P. (1761-1793), 103. 
Barres, M. (1862- ), 498-499. 



Barthelemy, J.-J. (1716-1795), 107. 
Baudelaire, C* de (1821-1867), 275, 

309, 332-342, 457, 459, 497. 
Bayle, P. (1647-1706), 62. 
Bazin, R. (1853- ), 499. 
Beaumarchais, P.-A. de (1732-1799), 

90, 98-99. 
Becque, H. (1837-1899), 394. 
Bellay, J. du. See Du Bellay. 
Belleau, R. (1528-1577), 26. 
Bentzon, Th. (Mme. Blanc, 1840- 

1897), 499. 
Benmger, J.-P. de (1780-1857), 158- 

159. 
Bernardin. See Saint-Pierre. 
Beroald. See Verville. 
Bestiaries, 4. 
Beyle, H. (Stendhal, 1783-1842), 174, 

191, 396, 404, 405-414, 423, 427, 

430. 
Blanc, L. (1811-1882), 271. 
Boileau, N. (1636-1711), 48-50, 72. 
Bossuet, J.-B. (1627-1704), 62. 
Bouchor, M. (1855- ), 318. 
Boule de suif (Maupassant), 458. 
Bourdaloue, L- (1632-1704), 62. 
Bourget, P. (1852- ), 396, 407, 409, 

414, 494-498. 
Bouvard et P^cuchet (Flaubert), 437. 
Brantome, P. de (1540-1614), 39. 
Brunetiere, F. (1849-1906), 273, 299- 

300, 497. 
Buffon, J.-L. (1707-1788), 105. 
Bug-Jargal (Hugo), 196-197. 
Burgraves (Hugo), 218-219. 
Bussy-Rabutin, R. de (1618-1704), 60. 



506 



INDEX. 



Calvin, J. (1509-1564), 32. 

Camus, J.-P. (1582-1653), 55. 

Carmen (Merim^e), 429. 

Ceard, H. (1851- ), 457. 

Cent nouvelles nouvelles (La Salle), 

17. 
Chamfort, S.-R.-N. (1741-1794), 60. 
Chanson de Roland, 2. 
Chansons de geste, 3. 
Chansons des rues et des bois (Hugo), 

243. 
Chants du cr^puscule (Hugo), 243. 
Chartreuse de Parme (Stendhal), 412. 
Chasseur vert (Stendhal), 412. 
Chateaubriand, R. de (1768-1848), 119, 

135-151, 157, 266, 406, 493. 
Chatiments (Hugo), 228, 230, 237-241. 
Chatrian, A. (1826-1890) 463. 
Chenier, A.-M. de (1762-1794), 93, 

107. 
Cherbuliez, V. (1832-1899), 465-466, 

491. 
Chrestien of Troves (about 1195), 4. 
Cladel, L. (1835- ), 499. 
Colomba (Merime*e), 429. 
Colonel Chabert (Balzac), 421. 
Com^die larmovante, 97. 
Commynes, P. de (1445-1511), 16, 31. 
Comte, A. (1795-1857), 265, 281. 
Condillac,£. de (1715-1780), 104, 408. 
Constant, B. (1767-1830), 124, 153, 

396. 
Contemplations (Hugo), 241. 
Contes drolatiques (Balzac), 423. 
Copped, F. (1843-1908), 321-324, 392, 

462. 
Corinne (De Stael), 128-129. 
Corneille, P. (1606-1684), 65-71, 72, 

89. 
Cosmopolis (Bourget), 497. 
Coulevain, P. de {Pseud.), 499. 
Cousin, V. (1792-1867), 265, 281. 
Cousine Bette (Balzac), 421. 
Crebillon, C. P. de (fils, 1707-1777), 

107, 110. 
Crebillon, P. de (pere, 1674-1762), 94. 
Cremieux, H. (1828- ), 390. 
Cromwell (Hugo), 202-204. 
Cure de Tours (Balzac), 420. 
Cur^e (Zola), 461. 



Dame aux camelias (Dumas), 358, 

362, 370-372, 421. 
Dancourt, F.-C. (1661-1725), 96. 
Danton, G.-J. (1759-1794), 103. 
Daudet, A. (1840-1897), 392, 462, 464, 

467-490. 
Daurat, J. (d. 1588), 26. 
Debacle (Zola), 454. 
Delille, J. (1738-1813), 92. 
Deroulede, P. (1846- ), 352. 
D^saugiers, M.-A. (1772-1827), 92. 
Descartes, R. (1596-1650), 57. 
Deschamps, A. (1809-1869), 156. 
Deschamps, £. (1791-1871), 156. 
Desfontaines, G.-F. (1733-1825), 86. 
Des Peners, B. (d. ab. 1544), 38. 
Desportes, P. (1546-1606), 28. 
Destouches, P. (1680-1754), 96, 98. 
Diderot, D. (1713-1784), 95, 104, 106, 

107, 108, 112. 
Dorat, C.-J. (1714-1789), 92. 
Drama, Early, 7, 13-15. 
Droz, G. (1832-1895), 463. 
Du Bellay, J. (1524-1560), 26. 
Duchesse de Langleais (Balzac), 421. 
Ducis, J.-F. (1733-1816), 95. 
Dudevant, A. (George Sand, 1804- 

1876), 191, 392, 396, 397-405. 
Du Laurens, H.-J. (1719-1797), 107. 
Dumas, A. (jils, 1824-1895), 98, 281, 

358, 362, 369-379, 403. 
Dumas, A. (pere, 1803-1870), 100, 

157, 176-178, 187-191, 405. 
D'Urfe\ See Urfe\ 

Education sentimentale (Flaubert), 

438. 
Encyclopedic, 104. 

£pisode sous le terreur (Balzac), 423. 
Erckmann, t. (1822-1899), 463. 
Esmeralda (Hugo), 216. 
Estaunie, fi. (1862- ) 499. 

Estienne, H. (1528-1598), 39. 
Eugenie Grandet (Balzac), 419. 
£vangeliste (Daudet), 482-483. 

Fabliaux, 5, 93. 
Fabre, F. (1830-1898), 466. 
Faguet, t. (1847- ), 299. 
Fenelon, F. (1651-1715), 62. 



INDEX. 



507 



Ferragus (Balzac), 421. 

Feuilles d'automne (Hugo), 221-222. 

Feuillet, O. (1821-1892), 392, 464-465, 

491. 
Feval, P. (1817-1887), 380. 
Fin de Satan (Hugo), 255. 
Flaubert, G. (1821-1880), 281, 403, 

433-440, 448. 
Flechier, E. (1632-1710), 62. 
Florian, J.-P. (1755-1794), 107. 
France, A. See Thibaut. 
Freron, E.-C. (1718-1776), 86. 
Froissart, J. (1337-1410), 15. 
Fromentin, E. (1820-1876), 463. 
Fromont jeune et Risler aine* (Daudet), 

472, 476. 
Furetiere, A. (1620-1688), 56. 

Gaboriau, t. (1835-1873), 463. 

Gautier, T. (1811-1872),. 155, 157, 
169-173, 184-186, 191, 281, 304, 318, 
459. 

G^nie du christianisme (Chateau- 
briand), 139, 143-145. 

Gentil-Bernard, P.-J. (1710-1775), 92. 

Germinal (Zola), 453, 455. 

Germinie Lacerteux (Goncourt), 441- 
442, 443. 

Gesta Romanorum, 6. 

Ghil, R. (1862- ), 350. 

Gobseck (Balzac), 421. 

Gomberville, M. de (1600-1674), 55. 

Goncourt, E. (1822-1896), and J. (1830- 
1870), 281, 394, 440-445, 490. 

Grail saga, 4. 

Gregh, F. (1873- ), 353. 

Gresset, J.-B. (1709-1777), 91. 

Greville, H. (1842-1876), 463. 

Grimm, F.-M. (1723-1807), 106. 

Guizot, F.-P. (1787-1874), ^66, 271. 

Guzla (M^rimee), 428. 

Gyp. See Mirabeau, S.-G.-M.-A. de. 

Halevy, L. (1834-1908), 390-391, 462. 
Hamilton, A. (1646-1720), 57. 
Han d'Islande (Hugo), 200-201. 
Hardv, A. (1560-1631), 31, 63-64. 
Helv^tius, C.-A. (1715-1771), 104, 408. 
Hennique, L. (1851- ), 394, 457. 
Heptame>on (Marguerite), 38. 



Heredia, J. de (1842-1905), 318-321. 
Hermant, A. (1862- ), 499. 
Hernani (Hugo), 154, 155, 206-210, 

371. 
Heroet, A. (d. 1568), 28. 
Hervieu, P. (1857- ), 395, 499. 
Holbach, P. d' (1723-1789), 104. 
Homme quirit (Hugo), 235-236. 
Hugo, V. (1802-1885), 100, 154, 156, 

173, 174, 191, 192-264, 281, 303, 402, 

434. 
Huysmans, J.-K. (1848-1907), 457. 

Illusions perdues (Balzac), 420. 
Immortel (Daudet), 484-485. 
Itin^raire de Paris a Jerusalem (Cha- 
teaubriand), 140, 148. 

Jack (Daudet), 476. 

Jean of Meung (1280-1318), 8-9. 

Jean of Troyes (d. after 1483), 16. 

Je'sus Christ en Flandre (Balzac), 423. 

Jodelle, t. (1532-1573), 26, 31. 

Joinville, J. de (1224-131?), 10. 

Juif errant (Sue), 420. 

Juvenal des Ursins (1388-1473), 16. 

Labiche,* E.-M. (1815-1888), 281, 

387-390. 
La Bretonne, R. de (1734-1806), 107, 

110, 449. 
La Bruyere, J. de (1645-1695), 61. 
La Calprenede, G. de (1610-1663), 55. 
La Chaussee, P.-C. de (1692-1754), 

95, 98. 
La Clos, P.-A.-F. de (1741-1803), 106, 

110, 496. 
Lafayette, Madame de (1634-1693), 56. 
La Fontaine, J. de (1621-1695), 50-54. 
La Halle, Adam de (about 1286), 7. 
La Harpe, J.-F. de (1739-1803), 106. 
Lahor, J. (1840- ), 318. 
Lamartine, A. de (1790-1869), 156, 

159-162, 280. 
Lamennais, R. (1782-1854), 401. 
La Mettrie, J. de (1709-1751), 107. 
Lamotte, A. de (1672-1731), 94, 98. 
Lanson, G. (1857- ), 299. 
La Rochefoucauld, F. de (1613-1693), 

58-60. 



508 



INDEX. 



La Salle, A. de (1398-1461), 16-17. 
Lavedan, H. de (1859- ), 462, 491. 
Ledru-Rollin, A. (1807-1874), 402. 
Lefranc, P.-C. (1814-1878), 388. 
L^gende des siecles (Hugo), 248-253. 
Le Maire de Beiges (1473-1548), 28. 
Lemaitre, J. (1853- ), 300-301, 

395. 
Lemercier, L.-J.-N. (1771-1840), 174. 
Leroux, P. (1797-1871), 402. 
Le Sage, A.-R. (1668-1747), 95-96, 

107-109. 
Lettres de mon moulin (Daudet), 470. 
Lisle, Leconte de (1820-1894), 309- 

318. 
Lisle, Rouget de (1760-1836 ), 92. 
Loris, Guillaurae de (ab. 1260), 8-9. 
Loti. See Viaud. 
Louis Lambert (Balzac), 420, 422. 
Louvet, J.-B. (1760-1797), 106, 110. 
Lucrece Borgia (Hugo), 214. 

Mably, G. de (1709-1785), 103. 
Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 436, 437, 

440, 445, 465. 
Madame Chrysantheme (Viaud-Loti), 

494. 
Maeterlinck, M. (1864- ), 395. 
Mairet, J. (1604-1686), 64. 
Maitre Pathelin, 14. 
Malebranche, N. de (1638-1715), 62. 
Malherbe, N. de (1555-1628), 28, 43- 

47, 81. 
Mallarm^, S. (1842-1898), 350. 
Malot, H. (1830-1907), 463. 
Manuel, E. (1823- ), 321-322. 
Marguerite of Navarre (1492-1549), 

25, 38. 
Margueritte, P. (1860- ), 395, 502- 

504. 
Mariage de Loti (Viaud-Loti), 493. 
Marie of France (XIII. cent.), 6. 
Marie Tudor (Hugo), 215. 
Marion de Lorme (Hugo), 211-212, 

358, 359, 362, 372. 
Marivaux, P. de (1688-1763), 96-98, 

107, 109. 
Marmontel, J.-F. (1723-1799), 107, 112. 
Marot, C. (1495-1544), 24-26, 93. 
Martin, H. (1810-1885), 265. 



Martyrs (Chateaubriand), 140, 147. 
Massillon, J.-B. (1633-1742), 62. 
Maupassant, G. de (1850-1892), 321, 

395, 396, 458-463, 497. 
Maupertuis, P.-L. de (1698-1759), 88. 
Maynard, F. (1582-1646), 47. 
Meilhac, H. (1832-1897), 390-391. 
Mendes, C. (1841-1909), 463. 
Menippee (Satire), 39. 
Mensonges (Bourget), 496-497. 
Merimee, P. (1803-1870), 157, 191, 396, 

413, 421, 427-431. 
Merrill, S. (1863- ), 350. 
Michel, M. (1812-1868), 388. 
Michelet, J. (1798-1874), 267-271, 420. 
Mirabeau, G.-H. de (1749-1791), 103, 

492. 
Mirabeau, S.-G.-M.-A. de (Gyp, 185?- 

), 491-492. 
Miracle Plays, 5. 
Mirbeau, O. (1850- ), 395. 
Mise>ables (Hugo), 228, 232-235. 
Moliere, J.-B.-P. die (1622-1673), 75- 

80. 
Mon frere Ives (Viaud-Loti), 493-494. 
Montaigne, M. de (1513-1592), 39-42. 
Montesquieu, C. de (1689-1755), 102, 

272. 
Moreas, J. (1856- ), 350. 
Morice, C. (1861- ), 302. 
Murger, H. (1822-1861), 463. 
Musset, A. de (1810-1857), 157, 165- 

169, 179-181, 182-183, 280, 401. 
Musset, P. de (1804-1880), 167, 401. 
Mystery Plays, 5. 

Nabab (Daudet), 468, 473, 477. 
Nerval, G. de (1808-1855), 157, 187. 
Nicholas of Troyes (about 1535), 38. 
Nisard, D. (1806-1888), 273. 
Nodier, C. (1780-1844), 156. 
Noel of Fail (about 1547), 38. 
Notre-Dame (Hugo), 220-221, 454. 
Numa Roumestan (Daudet), 473, 481- 
482. 

Ohnet, G. (1848- ), 392, 423, 490- 

491. 
Orleans, C. d> (1391-1465), 12. 



INDEX. 



509 



Odes (Hugo), 198-202, 204-205. 
Orientales (Hugo), 205. 

Pailleron, t. (1834-1899), 391. 
Palissot, C. (1730-1814), 372. 
Parents pauvres (Balzac), 420. 
Parny, £.-D. (1753-1814), 92. 
Pascal, B. (1623-1662), 57-58. 
Passion dans le desert (Balzac), 422. 
Pastourelles, 5, 7. 
Peau de chagrin (Balzac), 422, 423. 
Pellissier, G. (1852- ), 299. 
Pecheur d'Islande (Viaud-Loti), 493- 

494. 
Pere Goriot (Balzac), 420. 
Perrault, C. (1628-1703), 57. 
Petit chose (Daudet), 467. 
Petite paroisse (Daudet), 485, 497. 
Piron, A. (1689-1773), 91. 
Ponsard, F. (1814-1867), 280, 357. 
Pontus de Tyard (1521-1605), 26. 
Port-Tarascon (Daudet), 475. 
Pot-bouille (Zola), 451, 456. 
Pouvillon, E. (1840- ), 499. 
Prevost, A.-F. (1697-1763), 106, 109- 

110, 372. 
Prevost, M. (1862- ), 500-501. 
Psychologie de 1' amour moderne 

(Bourget), 496, 497. 

Quatre vents de 1' esprit (Hugo), 253- 

255. 
Quatre-vingt-treize (Hugo), 230, 236- 

237. 
Quinet, E. (1803-1875), 172. 

Rabelais, F. (149?-155?), 33-38, 93. 
Racan, H. de (1589-1670), 47. 
Racine, J. (1639-1699), 58, 70, 71-75. 
Rambouillet, Hotel, 61, 64, 67, 76. 
Ravnal, G. (1713-1796), 103. 
Raynouard, F. (1761-1836), 154. 
Redoute (Merim^e), 428. 
Recherche de l'absolu (Balzac), 422. 
Regnard, J.-F. (1655-1709), 80. 
Regnier, H. de (1864- ), 350. 
Regnier, M. (1573-1613), 46. 
Remusat, C. de (1797-1875), 174. 
Renan, E. (1823-1892), 281, 288-299. 
Renard the Fox, 7. 



Rene' (Chateaubriand), 140, 145-146. 
Ren^e Mauperin (Goncourt), 441. 
Restif de la Bretonne. See La Bre- 

tonne. 
Retz, Cardinal de (1614-1679), 58. 
Reve (Zola), 448. 
Reynaud, J. (1806-1863), 402. 
Ricard, J. (1848- ), 499. 
Richepin, J. (1849- ), 321. 
Rimbaud, A. (1854- ), 351. 
Rivoire, A. (1872- ), 313. 
Rochefort, H. de (1830- ), 229. 
Rod, E. (1857- ), 299, 499. 
Roi s'amuse (Hugo), 112-114. 
Rois en exil (Daudet), 479-480. 
Roland, Chanson de,|2, 3. 
Rollin, C. (1661-1741), 101. 
Roman de la rose, 8. 
Roman de Rou, 3. 

Roman d'un Spahi (Viaud-Loti), 493. 
Ronsard, P. de (1524-1585), 26-31. 
Rose et Ninette (Daudet), 485. 
Rosny, J.-H. (pseud, of J. H. Boex, 

1856- , and J. Boex, 1859- ), 

499. 
Rotrou, J. (1609-1650); 65. 
Rostand, E. (1868- ), 395. 
Rouge et le noir, Le (Stendhal), 411. 
Rouget de Lisle. See Lisle. 
Rousseau, J.-B. (1670-1741), 91. 
Rousseau, J.-J. (1712-1778), 98, 105, 

107, 113-118. 
Rutebceuf (d. ab. 1286), 7. 
Ruy Bias (Hugo), 216-218. 

Sade, Marquis de (1740-1814), 338. 
Saint-Amant, G. de (1594-1661), 47. 
Sainte-Beuve, C.-A. (1804-1869), 156, 

274-278, 282, 304, 321. 
Saint-Gelais, M. de (1491-1558), 26. 
Saint-Pierre, B. de (1737-1814), 110- 

111, 493. 
Saint-Simon, L. de (1675-1755), 101. 
Salammbo (Flaubert), 437, 438-439. 
Sand, George. See Dudevant. 
Sandeau, J. (1811-1883), 359-360, 400. 
Sapho (Daudet), 483-484. 
Sarcey, F. (1828-1899), 302, 388. 
Sardou, V. (1831-1908), 99, 379-387. 
Scarron, P. (1610-1660), 56. 



510 



INDEX. 



Sceve, M. (d. ab. 1564), 28. 

Scribe, A.-E. (1791-1861), 354-356, 

386, 393. 
Scuderv, G. (1601-1667), 55, 66. 
ScudeVv, M. (1607-1701), 55. 
Sedaine, M.-J. (1719-1797), 95. 
Seraphita (Balzac), 422. 
Seven Wise Masters, 6. 
Sdvigne, Madame de (1626-1696), 60- 

61. 
Sorel, C. (1597-1674), 56. 
Soumet, A. (1788-1845), 197. 
Splendeurs et miseres des courtesanes 

(Balzac), 420. 
Stael, Madame de (1766-1817), 119- 

135, 151, 157, 272. 
Stendhal. See Beyle. 
Sue (E.), J.-M. (1804-1859), 188, 269, 

402. 
Sully-Prudhomme, R.-F. (1839-1907), 

324-332. 

Taine, H.-A. (1828-1892), 271, 278- 
288, 407, 443, 446, 448, 462. 

Tamango (M£rim£e), 429. 

Tartarin de Tarascon (Daudet), 473. 

Tartarin sur les Alpes (Daudet), 474. 

Tentation de St. Antoine (Flaubert), 
435, 439. 

Th^rese Raquin (Zola), 446. 

Theuriet, A. (1833-1907), 466, 491. 

Thibaut, A.-F. (Anatole France, 1844- 
), 301-302. 

Thibaut of Champagne (1201-1253), 6. 

Thierry, A. (1795-1856), 266. 

Thiers, L.-A. (1797-1877), 266. 

Tocqueville, A. de (1805-1859), 266. , 



Torquemada (Hugo), 255. 
Tragedie bourgeoise, 97. 
Travailleurs de la mer (Hugo), 235. 

Urfe\ H. d' (1568-1625), 54. 

Vacqukrie, A. (1819-1895), 229. 

Vaugelas, C. de (1585-1650), 61. 

Vergniaud, P.-V. (1753-1793), 103. 

Verlaine, P. (1844-1896), 318, 321, 342- 
352. 

Verne, J. (1828-1875), 463. 

Verville, B. de (1558-1612), 39. 

Viaud, L. -M. (Pierre Loti, 1850- ), 
492-494. 

Viete-Griffin, F. (1864- ), 350. 

Vigny, A. de (1799-1863), 156, 162- 
165, 174, 175, 178-179, 181-182, 280, 
304. 

Villehardouin, G. de (1155-1213), 9-10. 

Villemain, A.-F. (1790-1867), 272-273. 

Villon, F. (1431-ab. 1484), 12-13, 93. 

Vinet, A. (1797-1847), 273. 

Vogiie\ M. de (1848- ), 492. 

Voiture, V. (1598-1648), 47. 

Voix inte>ieures (Hugo), 223-224. 

Voltaire, F.-M. Arouet de (1694-1778), 
82-90, 406; critic, 106; historian, 
101-102, 272; novelist, 111-112, 
466; poet, 92-94, 108, 408; philoso- 
pher, 103. 

Wace, R. (XIII. cent), 3. 
William Shakespeare (Hugo), 228. 

Zola, t. (1840-1902), 299, 393, 396, 
407, ,409, 423, 432, 445, 446-457, 490. 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 

By BENJAMIN W. WELLS, Ph.D. 

Dr. Wells is a scientific student of his subject ; yet he can put 
himself in the place of the general reader and feel a thoroughly 
genuine sympathy with that point of view. More than this book 
contains of the history of German literature, as Dr. Wells has said, 
the man of general culture need not know ; but less than it contains 
he will hereafter be answerable for not knowing, now that so judi- 
cious and genial a guide stands ready to impart it to him. — Bookman, 

Dr. Wells brings to his work a clear vision, sound thought, and 
careful study, and a love for the subject that makes everything 
fresh and refreshing. And he has one thing that sets him apart 
from that army of writers who are giving us essays on everything 
under the sun, — he speaks of no book which he does not know at 
first hand. — Springfield Republican. 

No one who may read this book will doubt that Mr. Wells is 
capable of making the scientific analysis of which he speaks. It is 
indeed his scholarship that has enabled him to prepare a book, 
in itself a work of literary merit, which brings nearer to the people 
some of the master minds of the world. — N. Y. Times. 

This book we regard as an interesting and valuable contribution 
to our accounts of German literature. In the first place it has a 
good and rational point of view, it is impartial, free from German 
conceit and verbosity ; and then it gives much information in a 
comprehensive and perspicuous form. We are not acquainted with 
any other book on this subject in English of which these things 
can be said. — Public Opinion. 

What we always prize in Scherer's work may be said of the 
present volume : it is very well written, and in general distin- 
guished by sound judgments. . . . We marvel only at the skill 
that has produced such a full, well-ordered, clear, and truly fas- 
cinating multum in parvo. — Translation from Blatter fiir litterarische 
Unterhaltung, Leipzig. 

12mo. Cloth. 418 pages. $1.00 net. 



LITTLE, BROWN, & COMPANY, BOSTON. 






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